So, Validation reduction is a worthwhile improvement, but there's still quite a lot of time spent reading all our files.
I can think of a few more or less wild and crazy alternatives. Sadly, Spring is very committed to the DOM. So my original idea of StaX seems beyond a reasonable level of effort. Unless Xerces is such a pig that we know a faster file-to-DOM path that starts with WoodStox. Plugging such a thing into Spring wouldn't be especially painful. On the other hand, is there any way we can 'precompile' XML files into some artifact that springs (ahem) into life as a DOM tree? I used to work on an OODBMS. I wonder if reading PYX would be significantly faster than reading XML. PYX seems to have largely evaporated.
