Another reason Apple's XML is pointless

A few posts ago I talked about how to read one of Apple's Plist XML files. Sure it works, but I have another reason to despise it. Not only is it tough to read in your own parser, not only is it tough to find a third party parser that will read them, it now sucks the memory of your computer too. Using the Apache parsers I found before I was able to read the directory iTunes stored music to, but it wasn't until I tried v.5 on other computers that I was getting memory heap errors, or basically the virtual machine was running out of memory. It took a few hours to pin the error down to reading the XML file. I watched the amount of memory that was used by iTunesDSM before and after reading the XML file. The memory used would be 50mb or so and then balloon to 300ish mb. Ridiculous. Of course that's not to say that other XML files wouldn't produce the same amount of memory requirements, the XML file itself is somewhere around 12 megabytes. But first impressions last, and I will always try to avoid Property List XML files.

I did fix it though. I strictly read the file for what it is now, instead of using a parser. I read the lines coming from the xml file and scan for the string that contains the music folder references. Not only is it much, much, much faster, it takes a lot less memory.

I also made a few changes to the FileWriter class. Instead of the CleanDirectoryTask coming up with files that don't already exist, the FileWriter does. I also made a few changes to the dialog that appears when copying files. As before a simple progress dialog appears when copying files takes longer than a set amount time. It's a neat way of doing it...and it's in the ProgressMonitorInputStream class.