Streaming Transformations for XML
Streaming Transformations for XML (STX) is an XML transformation language intended as a high-speed, low memory consumption alternative to XSLT.
Introduction
STX is an XML standard for efficient processing of stream-based XML. As we will discover XSLT is not well suited to stream based processing and STX fills this niche.
Conventional XML processing loads the entire XML document into memory for use. This is as opposed to SAX which streams XML events such as "open element" "close element" "text node" (and so on) so that other software that can begin interpreting these immediately, before the end has been loaded. Unfortunately some software can't effectively use individual XML segments this way and must stockpile these events, build up the whole document, and then begin processing. So is the case with XSLT. Because XSLT's XPath can select any node throughout the document it must have the entire document available in memory. This could be perceived as a bottleneck.
STX only allows queries based on nodes immediately surrounding the current node. This architectural decision means that STX is faster than XSLT, it can start transforming and outputting SAX event nodes as they arrive, and the memory use is significantly lower.
Standards
STX's query language is called STXPath.
Implementations of STX are available in Java and Perl.
Similar projects
Unlike STX which uses an XML syntax, these projects associate SAX events with callback functions.
External links
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