When to use AALTO and when WoodStox for xml processing with Jackson

Question

Reading this discussion

Aalto is by far fastest of the three, especially for parsing. It is commonly 50% - 100% faster than either Woodstox or SJSXP. One downside is that it does not handle DTDs (and thereby not external entities; it handles pre-defined and character entities).

it seems that Aalto is the recommended way to read/write xml with jackson. However on jackson-dataformat-xml page it recommends using Woodstox, which has not been updated for some time.

So what is the best way forward? Woodstox or Aalto?

Answer 1

I think that Woodstox is the safest choice for correct operation, given its wide functionality and being de facto Stax standard implementation -- most Java XML/Soap frameworks use Woodstox. So if you just want least hassle all around, it is a good choice.

But Aalto is significantly faster, and its features set is perfectly fine for Jackson XML module: DTD processing is not needed for JAXB-style data-binding.

So I would say that this comes back to how much you value performance (Aalto) and how much simple no-hassle "it just works with no problems whatsoever" (Woodstox). That is how I would choose myself, if I was developing system myself.

Besides, switching from one to the other is trivially easy: so one possibility is to try Aalto; and only if you face an issue (FWIW, there are no reported issue with Aalto/Jackson, as per issue tracker -- these are hypothetical issues).