Stream based approaches, progress and call for advice

[Chris Black]

Hello all,
I've been trying to get a stream-based implementation of just the core 
parts of the xml signature spec I need for my applications. I recently 
researched a bunch of alternatives to dom/jdom which is what we used to 
use and was causing performance problems, I ended up going with stax. 
Anyway, I have been working on a hacked up proof of concept using stax 
and only implementing enveloped dsa signatures including keyinfo and 
making some progress. Right now I am not using standard canonicalization 
because I was unable to find an easy way to do this in stax w/o writing 
it myself (which I may do in the future).
I saw in the mailing list archives back in November that Raul Benito 
mentioned perhaps working on a stax implementation. That path has my 
vote :)  One of the problems I ran into when trying to reference just 
parts of the existing apache xml signature implementation was that many 
of the classes don't have a way to use their functionality without using 
DOM, so I end up writing my own quick implementations of all the parts I 
need. This may of course just be due to my unfamiliarity with the code. 
I was wondering if there are any thoughts on how a stax implementation 
would fit into the package structure of the existing codebase and if 
there had been any further work on stax implementations by anyone. And 
also if anyone has tips on efficient canonicalization using 
streams/transforms in some way.

Chris