[jdom-interest] BEA's XMLBeans

[Dennis Sosnoski]

I'd compare XMLBeans with both document models and data binding in terms 
of performance, since it tries to be both. XMLBeans is using the Piccolo 
parser, which I already use in my own testing of document model and data 
binding frameworks, so the comparisons vs dom4j and JDOM should be 
pretty direct. Likewise the comparisons vs JAXB and my own JiBX 
(http://www.jibx.org) on the data binding side.

Given the architecture I'd expect XMLBeans to be fast for reading and 
writing documents, but slow when using the data binding features and 
probably (depending on the internal structure) when making modifications 
using either interface. The data binding part is what gets compiled from 
a Schema. AFAIK you don't need to have a Schema in order to use the 
document model-like features.

As I said before, I think this is an interesting technology. I see it as 
yet another niche-filler, though, rather than as the be-all and end-all 
that the engineers appear to have sold to BEA management.

  - Dennis

Frank Cohen wrote:

> Thanks for the thoughtful remarks. BEA did not disclose the terms of  
> the license agreement they were planning at the conference; However, 
> a  few of the BEA engineers I talked to expected it to be a liberal  
> license leading to a JSR. That would be consistent with other moves  
> they've made liked Java Web Services (JWS.)
>
> I asked them about benchmarking the code too and they said to wait  
> until the real release. So far their focus is on functionality.
>
> As I understand XMLBeans it's kind of a schema compiler. XML schema  
> goes in and Java class ready to handle the XML tree comes out. And 
> you  can compile at run-time or when you're building your code. That 
> makes  me think there is a lot they can do to optimize for good 
> performance.
>
> What did you have in mind to benchmark against? For example would you  
> test JDOM over Xerces?
>
> -Frank
>
>
> On Friday, March 7, 2003, at 09:58 AM, Dennis Sosnoski wrote:
>
>> XMLBeans is BEA's Grand Unified Model (aka GUM) for dealing with 
>> XML.  It's actually a data binding facade over an in-memory parse 
>> event  stream. This has some interesting features - you can access 
>> the  document using a data binding-like view through objects 
>> constructed  from a W3C XML Schema definition, and can also use XPath 
>> and XQuery  operations to access it as XML.
>>
>> The data binding view is likely to be very slow by comparison with  
>> other approaches, though, since it has to retrieve data out of the  
>> stream each time an object is (lazy) created, and has to store data  
>> back into the underlying stream when you modify one of the bound  
>> objects. If you're only working with a relatively small portion of 
>> the  document this is still fine, and it'll probably be mainly for 
>> that  type of application that XMLBeans is useful.
>>
>> BEA has declined permission for me to benchmark the code, on the 
>> basis  that it's beta. I think they realize they've got performance 
>> problems  and plan to eliminate these by tuning before the production 
>> release. I  think the problems are architectural.
>>
>> They've hinted in the past at open sourcing it in the longer term -  
>> was there anything said at the developer conference about this?
>>
>>  - Dennis
>>
>> Frank Cohen wrote:
>>
>>> Has anyone had a chance to look at BEA's XMLBeans package? They  
>>> announced XMLBeans at their developer conference this week. It 
>>> seems  to me that XMLBeans is another competitor to JDOM, or am I 
>>> missing  something?
>>>
>>> -Frank
>>>
>>> --  Frank Cohen, Founder, PushToTest, http://www.PushToTest.com, 
>>> phone:  408 374 7426
>>> Come to PushToTest for free open-source test automation solutions  
>>> that test and monitor
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>>>
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>>
>>
> -- 
> Frank Cohen, Founder, PushToTest, http://www.PushToTest.com, phone: 
> 408  374 7426
> Come to PushToTest for free open-source test automation solutions 
> that  test and monitor
> Web-enabled applications, especially Web Services for scalability and  
> reliability.
>
>
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