Using StAX with xslt transformations in the right way?

Question

Hi!
What do I need to enable the stax functionality to transformations, and which transformer implementations is supporting this? (or is the implementation irrelevant)
I have made the following to create a StaxSource, but is it enought?
---8<---
private static XMLInputFactory inputFactory = XMLInputFactory.newInstance();
    InputStream xmlInputStream = xmlUrl.openStream();
    XMLStreamReader xmlStreamReader = inputFactory.createXMLStreamReader( xmlInputStream );
    Source xmlSource = new StAXSource( xmlStreamReader );
transformer.transform(xmlSource, new StreamResult(writer));
---8<---I'm using:
org.apache.xalan.processor.TransformerFactoryImpland every thing seems to work very nice, but I'm not sure if I have done it in the right way and if it's something that I miss.
If I understand it correct normal transformations is transforming the xml to a Dom-tree but with StAX it shouldn't and be more memory efficient.
So anyone have any comments?
/Per

Answer 1

Indeed, as DrClap has already stated, using a StAXSource will not guarantee streaming. All of the mainstream XSLT processors build some sort of DOM structure internally because, in the general case, XSLT requires random access on the input document. The only exception to this is the identity transform, which in most processors is done in streaming fashion --i.e., without actually creating an intermediate structure.