Date: May. 20, 2001
Link: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-elexml/index.html?open&l=136,t=gr,p=electricXML
Source Author or Organization: Graham Glass, CEO/Chief architect, The Mind Electric, IBM developerWorks

In this article the author describes the development of Electric XML, a Java toolkit for manipulating and parsing XML designed for speed, size, and intuitive operation. The parser was originally built to raise the performance of the company's distributed computing platform ("Glue").

Motivation, challenges and the resulting design decisions are detailed and charted, including: analyzing data structures and selecting an object model hierarchy, building dynamic namespace resolution that lets developers access a namespace-qualified element in an intuitive fashion, adding support for a useful XPath subset, and producing "smart" nodes that know how to print, parse themselves and react to removal.

The article includes links for background and related reading, and the source code of Electric XML (user registration required).