libxmlj status report

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Hello all,

We're making a lot of progress on libxmlj. For those of you who don't 
know what that is, it's a JAXP implementation that uses Gnome libxml2 
and libxslt to do all the grunt work. It's usable now, and you can get 
it from jaxp CVS.

I've done a lot of conformance and performance testing. Conformance is 
against the W3C XML test cases. I've been using a 3rd-party test 
framework - http://cafeconleche.org/SAXTest/

Results for gnu.xml.aelfred2.XmlReader:

  Passed 925 of 2162 tests.

  Failed 1237 of 2162 tests.

  Conformance level: 42.78%.

Results for gnu.xml.libxmlj.sax.GnomeXMLReader:

  Passed 1626 of 2162 tests.

  Failed 536 of 2162 tests.

  Conformance level: 75.21%.

If anyone has about 400MB of spare webspace, I can upload the complete 
results showing what should have happened versus what did happen in 
each test.

Most of the libxmlj failures are in some way linked to the failure to 
provide correct callbacks for resolveEntity (I've talked to Daniel 
Veillard about this but still can't get it to work the way he says it 
does). As soon as that happens I expect a large jump up the conformance 
ladder. Even so it's not bad - remember that these test cases are all 
really marginal edge conditions. libxmlj is easily stable enough to do 
simple SAX and DOM parsing; for instance, I now use it as the parser 
for Ant.

In terms of performance, libxmlj easily outstrips aelfred2 even for 
tiny documents: on a simple document with one document element with one 
child element, libxmlj parses in 60-70% of the time aelfred2 takes, 
even with the overhead of loading the native library. On very large 
documents performance improves even more.

I need to fill in some of the less common parts of the API, and I want 
to have an XPath implementation, i.e. implement 
http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-XPath in libxmlj.dom, despite the fact 
it's not a standard yet. Based on discussions on the gcj mailing list, 
I should also store native pointers as jlongs in the Java classes 
(Julian did this originally but I stupidly moved to jints), and there 
are a few other things.

If anyone with some experience of libxml2 and/or libxslt would like to 
help, I can find tasks for them.

I'd also be interested in people's opinions about where we should be 
going with aelfred2 and the gnu.xml.dom classes.
- -- 
Chris Burdess
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