Lazy XML Parsing/Serialization Based on Literal and DOM Hybrid Representation

Distributed SOA computing environments usually use SOAP intermediaries that sit between senders and receivers to mediate SOAP messages. The intermediaries may add support services to the SOAP message exchange, such as routing, logging, and security. The typical processing by a SOAP intermediary is parsing the incoming SOAP messages, checking the data in each message, and then serializing the messages to put them back into the network. DOM is one of the popular interfaces to navigate an XML tree. Existing DOM implementations are not efficient for SOAP intermediary processing. Existing DOM implementations parse XML data to create tree data and traverse the tree data for serialization. Typically, a SOAP intermediary rarely modifies the tree data. In such situations, creating the tree data and serializing it back into XML data is computationally expensive. We propose a DOM implementation based on a hybrid data representation that uses both literal XML and DOM objects. In our implementation, a SOAP intermediary stores the original literal XML representation and reuses it to avoid traversing all of the tree data during serialization. We prototyped the DOM implementation and evaluated its performance.