Performance of various data merging methods

Recently I got the task to develop a Web Part which would aggregate the contents of a couple of RSS Feeds, sort them descending on the publishing date and display the top n of them. Thinking about how the whole thing could be done, I have found out that there are multiple methods to get things done. The Web Part was supposed to work on an Internet site so I decided to have a closer look at the performance of the various methods.

The first thing you notice is that the XSLT based approach is definitely much faster than other methods using DataTables. So if you have to provide a good performing data merging solution, you might want to check whether you are able to benefit of XSLT.

Performing XSL Transformations with JavaScript

by Maxim Porges @ 11:38 PM
At Highwinds, we document release notes for our software releases on our wiki. While this is a necessary and sensible practice, I do find it a little tedious since it requires copying some of the information from Bugzilla to our wiki.

Since I am lazy, and Bugzilla allows export of search results to XML, I made an XSL style sheet to convert the results of a bug search for a particular release to wiki text that TWiki would understand. This was all well and good, but required me to go through a number of manual steps...

Software Review: XMLSpy 2008 From Altova

Written by T. Michael Testi
Published June 12, 2008
See also:
» Product Review: ColorMunki From X-Rite
» Software Review: NetAdvantage For .NET Suite- NetAdvantage For Windows Forms 2008 Volume 1 From Infragistics
» The Writing Was on the Wall But GM Couldn't Read It

XMLSpy 2008 is the latest version of Altova's integrated development environment (IDE) for XML. XMLSpy allows programmers to create XML-based applications and Web services in a more dynamic and easier to understand environment. The version that I am reviewing is XMLSpy 2008 release 2 which came out on May 7, 2008 and it is based on the Enterprise version. There is also a Professional version and if you would like to view the differences between the two, you can check out the feature comparison list.

Integrated Support for XML Data Management

XML is increasingly being used as the language of data exchange. An XML document based on a DTD or a XML Schema contains data that conforms to a standard structure. A number of technologies, such as ebXML (Electronic Business XML), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), and RDF (Resource Description Framework) are based on XML. New business concepts, such as B2C and B2B, e-services, commerce resource platform, peer-to-peer commerce and collaborative commerce, have emerged as a result of XML. In this article, XML data management in Adaptive Server Enterprise 12.5 is highlighted.

Database’s Role in XML Data Management
Most XML processing without a database is done in the application layer. XML processing in the application layer has its disadvantages. Parsing XML in the application layer doesn’t include storing and querying the parsed XML document. Querying XML data with XPath and XQuery with a query engine isn’t supported. Transforming data with a XSLT processor and storing data in a file system is less optimal than database-based transformation and storage.

DocBook XSL - ePub target is ready for wider testing

If you're using the DocBook XSL distribution you've probably already seen that DocBook XSL 1.74.0 has been released with ePub support. Note that the 1.74.0 release is an experimental release, and is made available for testing and evaluation. See the release notes for a note about DocBook dot-0 releases.

XSL Tooling Updates

XSL Tooling 0.5M8

With the release Wednesday of Ganymede, the XSL Tooling project will also be having a milestone for 0.5M8. This is primarly a bug fix milestone, and XPath content assistance is a bit more intelligent. There may be a few issues still left to be worked out, but over all support for content assistance should be better. As stated earlier there is a new set of icons for the XSL Editor, and Launching/Debugging configurations. 0.5M8 is the last planned milestone. We'll work on getting a couple of release candidate ready next, and hopefully have an official 0.5 version by the end of July.

Rapid XSLT 0.1

The project is still too early in its development life cycle to be compared to other, more mature, editors and IDEs. Nevertheless, it does provide a complete set of tools that a programmer can use for writing XSLT.
There are no plans to further develop this project.
Some of the features of this editor:
- Ctrl+Shift brings up a list of frequently typed XSLT elements with a shortcut letter that allows one to be inserted.
- Shorthand Notation supports two groups of elements that abstract nicely to programmatic constructs: xsl:call-template and xsl:with-param elements and xsl:choose, xsl:when and xsl:otherwise. They can be written using the shorthand notation as a method call and a case-default construct, respectively.
- Ctrl+Alt+arrow keys navigate between elements and attributes.
- User preferences allow inserted code to be customized.
- One or more elements can be wrapped with an inserted element.
- Multiple XSLT files can be opened and edited at once.
The download file contains help sheets to explain how to use the program.
What are its known limitations?
- The preferences window is not user friendly in that the options that should be set via radio buttons are set by typing YES or NO into text fields.
- When closing an open document, the user is prompted to save even if no changes have been made to it.
- Only one construct can be typed at a time in the shorthand notation text area. Therefore, a case/default construct may not be followed by a method call, and vice versa.

Opera 9.5 review

At 6.8 MB, Opera 9.5's install file is about twice as fat as the approximately 3 MB we're used to from Opera - it is even larger than the 5.7 MB install of Mozilla Firefox 2.0 (but not larger than Firefox 3.0 at 7.8 MB).

Opera attributes some of Opera 9.5's improved speed to better support for current web standards such as (X)HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS 2.1, SVG 1.1 and JavaScript.

Testing XSL and Xpath with Java Swing

This week I finished a first version of a little java application that I created to build and test xpath expressions and xslt stylesheets.

I was very charmed with the little tool XTrans( http://www.simxtech.com/users/zc2/xtrans/). This smart tool is extreemly small (only a few KB) and enables you to edit xslt's, load xml files and transform them with the created xslt. Unfortunately for me is that it is a windows application, based on the MSXML parser. And I've not found a counterpart on Linux yet. Oh, of course you could do a lot of that with jDeveloper or XMLSpy. Maybe even better. But XTrans is so small and if you're working with xslt's, sometimes the only thing you need is a good ascii-editor and an xmlparser. And a little driver application that helps you with driving your xml and xslt trough the xmlparser.

Using AIR for XSLT Processing

One of the features we're investigating for the next version of the media player requires that we be able to do client-side XSL transformations. I had heard a few rumors that AIR exposes the XSLT processor that's built into WebKit (which is AIR's embedded HTML engine), so I shot off a couple of emails to the AIR team. Sure enough, this functionality is exposed through AIR's Javascript API.

Definitive XSL-FO

The definitive guide to state-of-the-art XML publishing with XSL-FO!

XSL-FO (XSL-Formatting Objects) enables enterprise applications to publish graphic-arts quality printed and electronic documents from any XML data store, no matter how large or complex. In Definitive XSL-FO, one of the world¡¯s leading XML experts shows how XSL-FO is revolutionizing document publishing. The book offers concise, authoritative . . .

Hands on: open-source scripting environment Komodo Edit 4.3

ActiveState announced the release of Komodo Edit 4.3 last week, the first version of the cross-platform programming tool to be distributed as open source. Komodo Edit is now tri-licensed under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL, just like Firefox. Through the OpenKomodo initiative, ActiveState has been working closely with Mozilla developers and the open-source software community in an effort to create an open platform that can provide a foundation for scripting and web application development tools.

There are a few competing open source tools that don't have quite so broad a scope but are still worth mentioning. For Python development, I think that Eric3 (it has an excellent graphical debugger) and PIDA (it has real Vim integration) are both pretty darn good. For web development, I think the KDE-based Quanta editor is the best open source solution. KDE also has a pair of cool graphical debuggers for JavaScript and XSL...

XML and Modeling

Data modeling is a big thing at Burton Group - a significant amount of the airtime expended in the ether around the virtual water cooler is devoted to teasing out the way that models interact, the best language for expressing such models and what characteristics best define a good model. In a way this isn't surprising - many of the people within the organization are former application or systems architects, and as such have a common belief that nonetheless is one that application developers don't necessarily share: before you write a single line of code, you should have a reasonably deep understanding of what particular piece of the real world you are attempting to model in that code.

Schematron was set up as one of a set of schema languages by ISO, specifically, ISO/IEC 19757 - Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) - Part 3: Rule-based validation - Schematron. Schematron was originally intended to be parsed by XSLT (or XSLT 2), and indeed this is still the simplest implementation, but there are also increasingly a number of stand-along Schematron validators written in Java and C##.

XML processing in Ajax, Part 2: Two Ajax and XSLT approaches

In Part 2 of this series, Mark Pruett presents two more approaches to the Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) weather badge. Both approaches use Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) transformations—one on the server side and the other in the browser.

Part 1 of this series introduced a problem specification: to build a weather badge that can be inserted easily into any Web page. The weather badge is constructed using Ajax techniques and uses data provided by the United States National Weather Service (NWS). That NWS data is provided in an XML format, updated every 15 minutes.

XSLT Profiler for Visual Studio Feb 08 Community Technology Preview

XSLT Profiler analysis is essential for developers if they need to develop reliable and robust software. The XSLT Profiler is capable of detecting the performance errors and defects in coding so that they are corrected at an early stage in the development, essential in reducing the overall cost of developing software applications. The XSLT Profiler tool is fully integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to provide a seamless and approachable user experience, combining several Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft XML Editor and XSLT Debugger, Visual Studio Team System, F1 (Performance Suites), and more.

Expand the Editing Capabilities of OpenOffice with XSLT

This tutorial shows you how to use OpenOffice's import/export filters to open your XML data as though it's just a plain document. From there, users can edit the document much more naturally and then save it back to its native format. You can also use this feature to easily turn your documents into XML data.

This tutorial is for users of OpenOffice, with a penchant for XML. If you're comfortable with the rigid syntax of the XML file format, and have dabbled with XML Style Language Transformations (XSLT), a world of possibilities opens up when you use OpenOffice as a custom editor for any type of XML-based data. This tutorial demonstrates the power of XSLT harnessed for the automatic manipulation and transformation of any XML-based data to and from the OpenDocument format, thereby bridging the divide between machine-readable XML and human-friendly hypertext.

Getting an Edge with Caching

Quick rendering of a page is a must on the Internet and on a company’s internal intranet. If that doesn’t happen, users’ patience is soon at an end. Technology platforms like SAP NetWeaver must therefore meet users’ expectations for speed and reliability and must be able to handle heavy loads. All that applies to 14 intranets of RWE, a utility based in Essen, Germany. Intelligent caching helps achieve the desired performance.

In this situation, RWE takes advantage of the newly developed caching functionality of Pironet NDH, a German SAP partner based in Cologne. The XML document is converted only when the document being requested has changed since the last time it was requested. If that is not the case, users access the result of the XSLT directly from the cache...

EditiX 2008 SP 1

EditiX is a cross-platform and multi-purpose XML editor and XSLT debugger (1.0 and 2.0), which helps Web authors and programmers use XML and XML-related technologies, such as XSLT, FO, and XSD schemas. It provides a lot of functionality within a refined IDE, which guides the user with intelligent entry helpers, and has real-time XPath location and syntax error detection. It allows the user to apply an XSLT or FO transformation, and shows the result in a separate view. It includes default templates for XML, DTD, XHTML, XSLT, XSD, XML RelaxNG, SVG, MathML, and XML FO. It can generate schema W3C, DTD or RelaxNG from a document instance.

Sun releases patch to address a number of serious vulnerabilities

A security vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) with the processing of XSLT transformations may allow an untrusted applet or application that is downloaded from a website to elevate its privileges. For example, an applet may read certain unauthorized URL resources (such as some files and web pages) or potentially execute arbitrary code. This vulnerability may also be exploited to create a Denial-of-Service (DoS) condition by causing the JRE to crash. (CVE-2008-1187)

The End of XSLT for .NET Programmers?

Microsoft's VB team is starting a series of articles on how to use XML Literals. Many of these articles will demonstrate how to replace XSLT code with VB by making direct comparisons between the two languages.

XML Literals is a syntax first pioneered for Haskell and later brought to Microsoft for use in C#. Not finding a home in either language, the Visual Basic team snapped it up and made it a cornerstone of VB 9. This should not be too much of a surprise, as the Haskell syntax was heavily influenced by VBScript's inline HTML notation.

In the first XML Cookbook article, Doug Rothaus demonstrates the VB equivalents to XSLT's , , , , , and elements. He also shows how to use XML Axis Properties in place of XPath.

Though the examples are simple, the VB versions are consistently shorter than the XSLT versions. Most of the gains are from moving away from XSLT's rather verbose syntax. Though not demonstrated here, VB also has an advantage in that you can call out to normal .NET code when needed.