Flat file parsing
Ok, I love flat files. I love them because I need to love them. Everywhere you go, you run into flat files. To be an XML purist is a painful plight. For such a dominant technology I am amazed that there isn't a java "best practices framework" for doing this. The number of times I've heard of people just writing "a little parser" for this simple flat file which turns into a monster java class that deals will all sorts of flat file vageries, is uncountable. In fact, there's a project right now at one of our client companies that is doing a full edi integration with java code and xslt.. the horror! the horror!
Anyhow, I've found a nice little engine that can. ServingXML seems to have created a generalised flat file processing engine. If you look at the example configurations you'll be amazed what it can do. Edifact no less!
ServingXML does a whole lot more, but the flat file bits are the bits that thrill me.
tags: eai
I just discovered ServingXML and looking into it now. I am processing large flat data files from our customers and need to get them into a common format so we can run our validations on them. I've been able to do it with XSLT but with larger and more complicated files the memory requirements get rediculous (my processing requires more than 1 GB of RAM in this approach). So I was hoping ServingXML might be a solution but I havn't had any luck with finding reviews on people using it for large input files. I want to know what kind of memory requirements and speed ServingXML can do over the 'standard' XSLT transformation that I had been doing.
Anyone have experience in this area?
Posted by: James Neff | June 24, 2006 at 03:40 AM