Intel has posted a beta of the Intel XML Software Suite, a collection of libraries for XSLT processing, XPath, DOM, SAX, and XML Schema Validation. The libraries seem to be written in native code for Linux and Windows, but a JNI based wrapper for Java is included. They claim this is twice as fast as XSLTC and Xalan for XPath and XSLT and six times faster than Xerces-C++ for raw parsing. If that's true, that's very interesting. Xerces isn't the fastest parser out there, but a six times speed-up is better than I think anyone else has done. It also suggests that the push for non-XML binary encodings is very likely premature. Most interestingly, they claim to have done this using standard APIs: SAX and DOM. Personally I had little doubt that XML parsing performance could be sped up, but I expected that this would require some new APIs designed for high performance. They don't seem to have needed that. I look forward to hearing more details of their algorithms, and seeing whether these claims hold up when others inspect them.
