Android XML Parser Performance

There's some useful information on stackoverflow about the performance of different XML parsers on Android.

Apparently Simple XML Serialization tied with DOM as the worst in terms of performance, and they are about 20 times slower than SAX.

Fortunately for us, we don't need to do too much XML parsing - parsing all the layers four times (thanks to JPL's ingenious web service design) only takes a few seconds, and it can be done with a background task as we only need to parse the basemap layers during startup. We may also use JSON instead of XML for bundled/cached layer data.