Just found out about some suboptimal serializer things in the current
Cocoon CVS, and since I didn't find anything relevant in the mail
archives, I thought I'd just come in and complain.

There are actually 2 things:

* the current XML/HTML serializers are performing identity XSL
transforms (with a real stylesheet!), instead of just serializing. This
means that they require the building of a complete DTM-tree, effectively
creating a buffer of all SAX-events entering the serializer. From the
CVS logs, I see this has been introduced to work around a bug occuring
in (of all things) the SourceWritingTransformer, though I did not find
what exactly.

* by default, cocoon is configured with "incremental-processing" for
XSL's set to true (this only applies when using xalan, not when using
xsltc). Since Xalan manages this setting in a static variable, this
property is shared for all XSL transformers in Cocoon. Since the
serializer is also performing an XSL transform, it also applies to the
serializer. Incremental processing is achieved by performing the
transform on a separate thread. This means that a simple pipeline
containing a (xalan) XSLT transform and a HTML serializer will already
use 3 threads (the original request-dispatching thread, and an
additional thread for each transform). (and the threads created by xalan
are not pooled).

So what I would propose is:

* if the xsl-ing serializer workaround is only required by the SWT, lets
make this behaviour configurable and make the default serializers not
use it.

* and possibly, lets set the incremental-processing to false per
default. It has an advantage if and only if the processed XML is rather
large, and the stylesheet is written is such a way that it can actually
be performed incrementally (for most XSL's I've seen in practical use,
this is not the case).

* finally (or better first of all), lets look if the serializer problems
cannot be solved in xalan.

Thoughts?

-- 
Bruno Dumon                             http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source, Java & XML Competence Support Center
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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