XML Presentation

[tbrannam]

I'm sorry for the adhoc nature of the presentation, it was asked to
talk about this stuff late yesterday.
I wished that the test harnesses that I was running would display the
stats properly.

It's hard to think that XML has been around for this long really.
While the discussion seemed remedial to some, it did seem to open up
some good discussions about the best approaches for parsing -- and how
the reintroduction of high latency/low bandwidth/low memory/slow cpu
platforms has made these concepts important again.

Here's some links related to the discussion - Which I think covers the
high points of what I was trying to relay.

http://www.metaobject.com/blog/2009/01/objective-xml-50.html
http://www.metaobject.com/blog/2009/01/iphone-xml-performance.html
http://www.metaobject.com/Technology/

The take aways were --- especially for large data sets -- (which will
take forever to download) - it's important to process and display
content in your iPhone application dynamically. Using the
NSXMLParser's standard use model requires that all data is downloaded
prior to parsing - which adds significant lag time to the
responsiveness of your application. Using libxml2's API supports
dynamic consumption of data off the wire (without maintaining the
entire XML document in memory), but has a typically C style interface.

The Objective-XML library from MetaObject combines the streamability
of libxml2's with some syntactic sugar which makes it easy to consume
from a Objective-C application.