Date: Apr. 23, 2001
Link: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-xslt2/?dwzone=x?open&l=132,t=gr,p=saxon
Source Author or Organization: Michael H. Kay, IBM developerWorks

In this article Michael Kay, author of the Saxon XSLT processor and XSLT Programmer's Reference from Wrox Press, deconstructs the Saxon architecture to illustrate inner workings of an Extensible Style Language Transformations (XSLT) processor.

Individual modules and their component parts are examined in detail, including the XML parser, tree builder, tree navigator, stylesheet compiler, stylesheet interpreter, and XML Path Language (XPath) expression parser.

Kay explains some of the optimization techniques he used to improve the speed of Saxon twentyfold in the past eighteen months, and examines current challenges to processor developers, such as finding a way to write a functioning processor that does not build the source tree in memory.