Processing XML with Java™: A Guide to SAX, DOM, JDOM, JAXP, and TrAX

DOM

The Document Object Model, DOM, is the second major standard API for XML parsers, and the first tree-based API I'll consider. Most major parsers implement both SAX and DOM. DOM programs start off similarly to SAX programs, by having a parser object read an XML document from an input stream or other source. However, whereas the SAX parser returns the document broken up into a series of small pieces, the equivalent DOM method returns an entire Document object that contains everything in the original XML document. You read information from the document by invoking methods on this Document object or on the other objects it contains. This makes DOM much more convenient when random access to widely separated parts of the original document is required. ...