RAX-J: Radically Improving the Processing of XML Applications
XML is rapidly becoming the protocol and format of choice for interactions among disparate systems and organizations connected via networks. More than a text-based, metadata format for data interoperability, XML is now the answer to solving many of the long-standing issues with application and data integration as well as providing a lingua franca for developers to create application programming interfaces (APIs) that arbitrary systems can interact with.
Despite all the positive momentum that XML continues to garner in the enterprise, XML remains a highly inefficient and burdensome protocol to process. XML processing requires a dozen steps or more, including parsing, decryption, validation, and message transformation activities. This burdensome collection of tasks is increasingly bogging down systems with menial chores before they can even begin processing business logic. This paper aims to take the XML processing challenge one step further by suggesting that developers are the cause of many of the problems in their use of the increasingly obsolete DOM and SAX methods of XML parsing. Instead, this paper suggests a new approach to XML processing that improves upon the increasingly obsolete DOM and SAX methods of XML parsing: Random Access XML for Java, (RAX-J).