This benchmark has two sub-benchmarks: XML.transform and XML.validation. XML.transform exercises the JRE's implementation of javax.xml.transform (and associated APIs) by applying style sheets (.xsl files) to XML documents. The style sheets and XML documents are several real life examples that vary in size (3KB to 156KB) and in the style sheet features that are used most heavily. One "operation" of XML.transform consists of processing each style sheet / document pair, accessing the XML document as a DOM source, a SAX source, and a Stream source. In order that each style sheet / document pair contribute about equally to the time taken for a single operation, some of the input pairs are processed multiple times during one operation.
Result verification for XML.transform is somewhat more complex than for other of the benchmarks because different XML style sheet processors can produce results that are slightly different from each other, but all still correct. In brief, the process used is this. First, before the measurement interval begins the workload is run once and the output is collected, canonicalized (per the specification of canonical XML form) and compared with the expected canonicalized output. Output from transforms that produce HTML is converted to XML before canonicalization. Also, a checksum is generated from this output. Inside the measurement interval the output from each operation is only checked using the checksum.
XML.validation exercises the JRE's implementation of javax.xml.validation (and associated APIs) by validating XML instance documents against XML schemata (.xsd files). The schemata and XML documents are several real life examples that vary in size (1KB to 607KB) and in the XML schema features that are used most heavily. One "operation" of XML.validation consists of processing each style sheet / document pair, accessing the XML document as a DOM source and a SAX source. As in XML.transform, some of the input pairs are processed multiple times during one operation so that each input pair contributes about equally to the time taken for a single operation.