Tag: XML

It is inconvenient to compute XML data, so a class library is necessary and useful to handle it. In this essay, we will compare four types of XML class libraries – dom4j, MySQL, Scala and esProc SPL, in the aspects of syntactic expressiveness, deployment configurations, and data source support.

There are three approaches. One is to store XML strings in a database and compute XML in SQL. Its advantage is making the most use of SQL’s computing ability, and there are two disadvantages. SQL, based on two-dimensional structured records, is not good at computing multilevel XML, and has extremely complicated data loading process that results in poor performance. The second is to parse XML using one of the Java libraries, such as XOM, Xerces-J, JDOM and Dom4J and compute XML using XPath syntax. The merit is straightforward and efficient, and demerit is that XPath only supports conditional queries and