performance question

Hi everyone,

At this moment, I am working on a web service and I am looking for the
most "usable" way to handle XML. I discarded JDOM as it seems to be
rather slow. Then I got here and I found these options:
* Either I can follow the easy steps in the "5 seconds tutorial" on
the Xalan homepage (using XPathFactory)
* or I can directly create a new instance of org.apache.xpath.XPath class

I would prefer the "factory way" as it seems to me to be more readable
(I know, a matter of taste). However, I heard that when I use the
factory way and "evaluate" method, I get a seriuos performance hit.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance,
Jan