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XQuery Java Code Generation

The release introduces the ability to compile a query to Java source code. The facility is available in Saxon-SA, and it applies to the Java platform only.

This is a first release of this capability and it should be treated as a beta release, providing early access for evaluation. Feedback is very welcome. Restrictions include:

It's important to have the right expectations for performance. Very often the query will run twice as fast, but the speed-up factor is quite variable. A great deal of the time is spent in the run-time library, and operations such as parsing, tree navigation, sorting, and serialization benefit very little from compilation. Arithmetic computation, on the other hand, improves a lot (especially when it takes place in a predicate or where condition), and so does function calling. For simple path expressions such as /a/b/c/d there is no speed-up at all, but for some queries involving complex recursive function calls the compiled code may be a factor of four or five faster.

It is hoped to extend this capability to XSLT in a subsequent release. Compiling for .NET is still under consideration, as is direct generation of bytecode rather than Java source code.

For more details see Compiling Queries to Java code.

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