Flutterby™! : XML hardware?

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XML hardware?

2001-07-25 19:02:19+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

So I've been diddling more than I want to with XML recently, and my opinion of it is... changing slightly negatively... and I'm starting to think "Gee, some hardware instructions to deal effectively with some of the parsing and UTF-8 issues so that these GHz PIII boxes aren't reduced to a crawl sure would be nice!" Admittedly most of the problem is probably just in memory access issues, but there have to be some cool ways to accelerate processing.

[ related topics: Content Management ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment made: 2003-06-05 02:17:05.521741+00 by: Phil Johnston

You mean like DataPower's XML accelerator, http://www.datapower.com/products/ ?

#Comment made: 2003-06-05 20:00:57.39257+00 by: Dan Lyke

Oooh. If I were still doing that big XML database thing I'd probably chase this further. Didn't do any tests to see if the PCI bus would become an issue before the parsing speed did because I envisioned it mainly as additional CPU instructions, but now I'm going to have to go read their whitepapers and see what they're doing.

Thanks!

#Comment made: 2003-06-06 16:23:59.646763+00 by: Dan Lyke

Okay, I've dug through a little further, and it looks mostly like this just does XSLT (and similar) transformations. Perhaps useful, but it was simple parsing that was sucking the cycles when I first started looking at doing this stuff.

Come to think of it, a box that you could send XML blocks and get them back in some sort of fixed length, or size+string ala QuickTime, chunked format could be useful.