Chapter     15

Parsing, Creating, and Transforming XML Documents

Applications commonly use XML documents to store and exchange data. In Chapter 15, I introduce XML for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with this technology.

Java supports XML via the SAX, DOM, StAX, XPath, and XSLT APIs. After introducing XML, I also introduce these APIs, except for StAX, which Android doesn’t support. Instead of StAX, I introduce Android’s XMLPULL V1 API, which is somewhat equivalent to StAX.

What Is XML?

XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a metalanguage (a language used to describe other languages) for defining vocabularies (custom markup languages), which is key to XML’s importance and popularity. XML-based vocabularies (such as XHTML) let you describe ...

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