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An Overview of the Packages

The SAX and DOM APIs are defined by XML-DEV group and by the W3C, respectively. The libraries that define those APIs are:

javax.xml.parsers

The JAXP APIs, which provide a common interface for different vendors' SAX and DOM parsers.

org.w3c.dom

Defines the Document class (a DOM), as well as classes for all of the components of a DOM.

org.xml.sax

Defines the basic SAX APIs.

javax.xml.transform

Defines the XSLT APIs that let you transform XML into other forms.

The "Simple API" for XML (SAX) is the event-driven, serial-access mechanism that does element-by-element processing. The API for this level reads and writes XML to a data repository or the Web. For server-side and high-performance apps, you will want to fully understand this level. But for many applications, a minimal understanding will suffice.

The DOM API is generally an easier API to use. It provides a relatively familiar tree structure of objects. You can use the DOM API to manipulate the hierarchy of application objects it encapsulates. The DOM API is ideal for interactive applications because the entire object model is present in memory, where it can be accessed and manipulated by the user.

On the other hand, constructing the DOM requires reading the entire XML structure and holding the object tree in memory, so it is much more CPU and memory intensive. For that reason, the SAX API will tend to be preferred for server-side applications and data filters that do not require an in-memory representation of the data.

Finally, the XSLT APIs defined in javax.xml.transform let you write XML data to a file or convert it into other forms. And, as you'll see in the XSLT section, of this tutorial, you can even use it in conjunction with the SAX APIs to convert legacy data to XML.

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This tutorial contains information on the 1.0 version of the Java Web Services Developer Pack.

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