[jdom-interest] Re: New realease, Text class... Arghh

[Dennis Sosnoski]

Using indexed lookup is not necessarily a good idea with the (beta) 
released version of JDOM. This code returns a linked list (PartialList), 
so indexing can get very expensive - it requires chaining through the 
list on every access. If you *know* you're working with an ArrayList or 
equivalent indexing through the elements is great. Otherwise it's safer 
to use an Iterator, especially since object creation overhead is pretty 
low for Hot Spot JVMs.

If the PartialList code is replaced for the next release of JDOM it 
should show some nice performance improvements. Methods of the type you 
mentioned (attributeCount(), nodeCount(), getAttribute(int), and 
getContent(int)) would also help, since they eliminate the need for 
lists to be created just so something can be returned - I pointed out a 
while ago that JDOM memory usage actually grows by about a third in my 
tests after a document is walked for the first time. This is because 
when you ask for the attributes of an element that doesn't have any yet 
JDOM creates a new list. Being able to access the attributes and content 
directly would avoid this type of issue.

dom4j provides these methods, by the way, which is one of the reasons it 
generally gives better performance than the current JDOM.

  - Dennis

Bradley S. Huffman wrote:

>Dennis Sosnoski writes:
>
>>I'm glad to see that JDOM is adding these methods
>>
>
>May add these methods, I just hack and submit ;)
>
>>I'm not sure it's entirely fair to say "those test have a problem", 
>>considering that I used what appeared to be the best methods available 
>>in the released version of the code. ;-)
>>
>
>It wasn't about which JDOM methods you used, but about using a Iterator
>to trasverse a List inside a recursive method (BenchJDOM.walkElement).
>This caused the test (not JDOM) to added a additional time pentaliy.
>Granted, the change to using a for loop still doesn't give JDOM the best
>times, but the test should be as neutral as possible.
>
>In all fairness I would of used a Iterator myself and not given it a second
>thought. But now after seeing a good example of how it can affected things,
>I've made a mental note to always use a for loop and List.get(int) unless
>I need the functionality of remove.
>
>Ahhh, the joys of objects.
>
>Brad
>