[xml] Kudos...

[Matt Sergeant <matt sergeant org>]

Just wanted to say kudos to the libxml2 and libxslt team. Skip this if you
don't want to hear mush :-)

Some of you will know that in AxKit we have a language called XSP, which
is an XML language for building up dynamic content. It uses what we call
taglibs (a term taken from JSP) to hide larger pieces of functionality.
XSP works by parsing the XML and generating Perl code, that is compiled
into the server, and subsequently run on each "hit". The perl code
generates XML, and then the XML is passed back to the AxKit main loop, to
either be output to the browser, or passed onto another transformation
stage.

Anyway, XSP used to generate perl code that built XML::XPath nodes. This
worked wonderfully, but was a little slow.

This weekend I ported the code over to use XML::LibXML nodes (the perl
interface to libxml2). This has resulted in such a massive speedup that
I'm blown away. I have a pretty complex page that is built using taglibs,
going to postgresql to get results, etc. It then gets passed to libxslt
(via XML::LibXSLT) to be styled into HTML with layout. There is no caching
involved - except of the perl script that gets built from the XSP page.
Every hit has to read from postgresql, generate the XML nodes, parse the
XSLT stylesheet, transform the XML, and output to the browser.

I get the results back in about 90ms.

This stuff is fantastic. Thanks, you guys!

-- 
<Matt/>

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