with the increasing prevalence of web services not that they are always a good thing i doubt that parsing xml will be something that will remain at the java application layer for long recent threads here on fork indicating the move towards hardware parsing or this code even become part of the native implementation of java on various platforms reza b far original message from fork admin URL mailto fork admin URL on behalf of adam l beberg sent sunday september NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER pm to mr fork cc fork URL subject re java is for kiddies on sun NUMBER sep NUMBER mr fork wrote NUMBER hardware is getting so fast that i m not sure if the performance difference between java and c c are relevant any more when out of the box parsing transform of xml in java is NUMBERx slower than c on the same hardware then it does matter yea and that on top of the NUMBERx of all the parsing engines over just bigendian ing it and passing the data NUMBERx in the raw then it really matters adam l duncan beberg URL beberg URL 