XMLBooster takes a radically different approach:

• One first describes the set of acceptable XML messages using an ad hoc formalism. This formalism, hereafter referred to as the meta-definition, can, in first approximation, be seen as a DTD extended to describe a data structure that will receive the various parts of the message in addition to the structure describing of the message itself.
• Using this meta-definition as input, XMLBooster produces an XML parser as a module in one of the programming languages it supports. This module is generated in source form, and can be used on any platform where a working compiler for the target language is available.
• The application programmer can then call this module, which will return an error message if the input does not comply with the message format described in the meta-definition, or a fully initialized data structure in the host language if the input has been analyzed successfully.

Building a usable data structure in the host language goes far beyond the sole performance issues : accessing the XML generic tree using dynamic searches based on string comparisons is cumbersome and error prone. Most errors are not caught at compile-time and systems must be debugged extensively before a decent level of quality can be guaranteed.

Replacing these dynamic lookups by statically defined data structures makes such dynamic mistakes totally impossible, making the task of the programmer much easier and improving the overall quality of her (or his) work.

This approach is much faster than the generic XML parser approach (see our benchmarks).