Tests

To prove the effectiveness of our tests, we ran both XPath Functional and Performance Tests on the following XML query processors:

XSLTproc (version 10114), an XSLT processor developed in C for the Gnome project.
Xalan-Java (version 2.7.0), an XSLT processor witten in Java from The Apache Software Foundation.
SaxonB (version 8.8J), an XSLT and XQuery processor written in Java from Saxonica of Michael Kay.
Qizx/open (version 1.1), an XQuery processor witten in Java from Axyana Software.

All the tested processors support XPath 1.0 and are freely available on the Internet. We ran the tests on an Intel Pentium III with CPU at 1 GHz, 256 MB of RAM, running Linux version 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4. We took advantage of XCheck-Java, a benchmarking platform for XML query engines. This saved much time by automatizing a lot of tedious and repetitive tasks and gave us immediate functional and performance feedback.

It is well noticing that our goal here is not to show that one of the above engine is better than the other (even though, from our investigation, the reader can draw his or her own conclusions). The aim is to give an instance of how the proposed tests for XPath might be used to better understand the functional and performance behavior of XML query processors.