XSLTC 2.6 rocks, only slightly out of tune

[Nathaniel Alfred <Al...@swx.com>]

Already in December we launched the all-Cocoon redesign of our SWX Swiss
Exchange main website http://www.swx.com.

Initially we had to fight some performance problems due to XSLT
transformation with interpreted Xalan taking around one second per page
(after profiling and optimizing the stylesheet).

Following http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/XSLTC I then tried the XSLTC
compiler coming with Xalan 2.6.0, and it blew me off my feet.  The
compiled stylesheets are an order of magnitude faster than interpreted
Xalan, and solved all our performance problems.

There a few gotchas where the compiled stylesheets do not work properly.
Up to now we found three cases in our XSLT code where XSLTC behaved
differently from interpreted Xalan:

	http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XALANJ-2030
	http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XALANJ-2031
	http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/XALANJ-2032

All of them are fairly easy to workaround (and most likely won't show in
your stylesheets), and only small nuissances compared to the gain in
speed.  Also XSLTC does more compile time checks catching errors such as
calling undefined template names which makes interpreted Xalan to throw
up only at runtime.

My recommendation:  use interpreted Xalan for development, use XSLTC for
stylesheet validation and production but rigorously compare output of
interpreted and compiled stylesheets.

NB I don't see any memory leak which apparently plagued earlier
Xalan/XSLTC versions.

Happy New Year to everybody,
Alfred

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