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Efficient scripting - Balisage 2009
David Lee, Epocrates Norman Walsh, Mark LogicBalisage 2009 At the International Symposium on Processing XML Efficiently
Monday, August 10, 2009
Montreal, Canada
The efficiency and performance of individual XML operations such as parsing, processing (XSLT, XQuery) and serialization, and the merits of different in-memory document representations, have been widely discussed. However, real world uses cases often involve many operations orchestrated using a scripting environment. The performance of the scripting environment can often overshadow any performance gains in individual operations. In an exploration of real world scripting, we compare performance of several scripting languages and techniques on a set of typical XML operations such as generation of a table of contents and conditionally accessing non-XML files identified in XML documents. Based on performance results, we suggest best practices for scripting XML processes. Scripting languages compared include DOS Shell (CMD.EXE), Linux Shell (bash), XMLSH, and XProc (calabash). These are run (where possible) on multiple operating systems: Windows XP, Linux, and