Virtual DOM: An Efficient Virtual Memory Representation for Large XML Documents

Standardized main memory representation methods (DOM) are quite inadequate to represent large XML documents, both in terms of space (necessary amount of memory) and, consequently, in time: it easily happens that it is not possible to load large XML documents in main memory. In this paper, we present virtual DOM, a Java package that provides an efficient representation technique for large XML documents. It adopts a specifically designed virtual memory technique: memory blocks allocated to represent the document are swapped, when necessary, by skipping the operating system swapping mechanism; this way, the actual main memory needs are kept under control, the thrashing phenomenon is avoided even for large documents.