Fast retrieval and display of results to web browser

Hello,
  I am working on refactoring my companies search engine, and a critical component of the search is that the results be displayed very quickly. We have done enourmous work on making the queries fast (under 1 second), but the bottleneck always seems to be how we process the results into HTML and send them to the users web browser.

Running Tomcat, we currently use a JSP page to pass the search parameters to a Java class that queries the database and generates HTML based on the ResultSet object. The method we use to generate the HTML is very low tech, we simply generate a String that contains HTML along with the data from the ResultSet and print the String out to the users web browser via the PrintWriter object obtained from the session.

I would like to solicit ideas as to how this process can be improved. What's the absolute fasted way to get database data transformed into HTML and displayed in the users browser? I'm exploring maybe using the Oracle XML Utilities, but I haven't found much information about the speed of that technology.

It would be nice if the suggestions would fit into our current Oracle/Solaris/Tomcat/JSP and Java architecture, but not a requirement.

Thank you very much!

• Andre