XML Parsing for Real Time Embedded System

Extensible Markup Language (XML), a language for semi-structured documents, has emerged as the core of the web services architecture, and is playing crucial roles in messaging systems, databases, and document processing. XML is human readable stream of data, where each data item is tagged with a name. The formats of messages and the names of the tags are specified in a schema, which itself is expressed in XML. One document can be described by multiple schemas and the tags in the document have namespaces that facilitate resolving what tag belongs to what schema. The result is a structured document that is mostly self-descriptive. When using XML in embedded systems, certain issues and opportunities crop up, and one of the issues is related to the processing of XML data in an efficient way. Embedded systems differ from conventional computing platforms for their limited resources. High computation cost of software- based XML parser raises the resource usage and lowers the performance of embedded systems. One of the challenges faced by the processing of XML data in embedded automation controllers is the fulfillment of real-time requirements with the correctness and deterministic time.