Unmarshall Best Practices

Hello everybody,

I have a requirement wherein i have to process hundreds of xml.What needs to be implemented is as below:

Create an xml request(I am planning to use jdom here ,do you suggest anyother);
send the request xml as a httpPost to a url(call http connection in a thread)
Recieve the response xml and process it.

The question is on step 3 of above- how to extract data from specific nodes of the response xml.
Question 1>Should i unmarshall to an object or use someother technique?
Question 2>If i have to unmarshall, should i use castor or anyother latest technology.?

Remember i have to process hundreds of xml and performance and
scalability are my major considerations.Any thoughts of best practices?

Regards,
GR

Hi!
If you only need to do one pass over an XML response to get the data, then you can use an event-based XML parser, like StAX.
Such a parser will be both faster and more memory efficient compared to parsers that build an object-tree in memory.
However, I do suggest to create sample programs that you try out on real data or data that is very similar to real data.
I have heard that there may even be differences between different event-based parsers depending on the size of the data to parse.
Perhaps you will even use one parser for smaller messages and another for large messages.

Finally: Design your program so that you can easily switch between different parsing technologies. This way you can always correct any mistakes later.
Best wishes!

Sure i will look into Stax and what about creating xml request, should i use jdom or simply use a stringbuilder? Which way has better performance.?

Hi!
I don't dare telling you that you will have the best performance using technique A.
The answer is the classical "it depends".
The best advice I can give is to perform some kind of benchmark using the kind of data, or at least very similar, that you intend to use in a production environment.
That way you will know for sure what is the best decision, given your particular situation.
Best wishes!