XML Parsers - A comparative study with respect to adaptability

Sammanfattning: Data migration is common as information needs to be moved and transformed between services and applications. Performance in the context of speed is important and may have a crucial impact on the handling of data. Information can be sent in varying formats and XML is one of the more commonly used. The information that is sent can change in structure from time to time and these changes needs to be handled. The parsers’ ability to handle these changes are described as the property “adaptability”. The transformation of XML files is done with the use of parsing techniques. The parsing techniques have different approaches, for example event-based or memory-based. Each approach has its pros and cons. The aim of this study is to research how three different parsers handle parsing XML documents with varying structures in the context of performance. The chosen parsing techniques are SAX, DOM and VTD. SAX uses an event-based approach while DOM and VTD uses a memory-based. Implementation of the parsers have been made with the purpose to extract information from XML documents an adding it to an ArrayList. The results from this study show that the parsers differ in performance, where DOM overall is the slowest and SAX and VTD perform somewhat equal. Although there are differences in the performance between the parsers depending on what changes are made to the XML document.