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The two most popular programming models for parsing XML documents are:
- The Simple API for XML (SAX)
SAX uses an event-driven model: the client application is
continuously notified as document features are recognized by the parser.
SAX was developed by a group of people on the XML-DEV mailing list (http://www.xml.org/xml/xmldev.shtml).
It is now a universally accepted de facto standard
- The Document Object Model (DOM)
DOM uses an object-driven model: the entire XML document is parsed
and stored as a tree hierarchy of objects (nodes), which the client
application can subsequently access, as needed.
DOM was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (http://www.w3.org/DOM/),
and is now a W3C standard.
A useful discussion of how the models work, and their pros and cons may be
found at http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/03-sep/o53devxml.html
.
Some other interesting approaches are:
- Java API for XML Parsing (JAXP)
JAXP provides an abstraction layer to XML parser implementations (both
DOM and SAX), and applications that process Extensible Stylesheet Language
Transformations (XSLT).
- JDOM (http://jdom.org/)
- dom4j (http://dom4j.org/)
Both JDOM and dom4j are open source projects that have developed a
Java-specific API to take advantage of specific Java language features.
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