JSP™ and XML Integrating XML and Web Services in Your JSP™ Application

Why Not Just Use SAX or DOM?

There are several different ways to read, write, and manipulate an XML document. Up to this point in the book, we have covered two major APIs: SAX and DOM. With these APIs, a Java programmer can do quite a bit with XML. However, each of these APIs has its weaknesses.

SAX is a very fast way to read in and process an XML document. However, SAX doesn't create a memory representation of the XML document. It instead permits us to stream through an XML document. SAX is a forward-only read process. This means that SAX is perfect when only a single pass through a document is required. However, it isn't always the right solution if the program needs to repeatedly access the same XML document. In cases where the data needs ...