Optimization

A Copy of my comments posted to Norman Walsh's blog post on XProc:

In working with DocBook, I've often thought that some kind of 
declarative approach for specifying the pipeline, etc. was needed.

In specifying the rules for building a (large) set of output documents 
from a (large) set of input doucments, one problem I have wanted to 
solve is avoiding redundant processing when input documents have not 
changed.

XInclude and XSLT make this difficult to do in an Ant or Maven build 
file since there is no tool (that I know of) that can track whether any 
of the included files have changed. Currently, it seems, you can either 
do the entire transform each time or only run it if the "root" XML or 
XSLT document has changed.

I realize this would be an implementation detail/optimization but it 
might be worthwhile considering this possibility while working on the spec.

I remember the performance breakthrough when C language tools solved 
this problem and would like to see the same thing for XML/XSLT.

-- Sean

Received on Sunday, 1 October 2006 23:12:51 UTC