Sams Teach Yourself J2EE™ in 21 Days

Parsing XML

So far, you have used Internet Explorer or other third-party tools to parse your XML documents. Now you will look at three APIs that provide a way to access and manipulate the information stored in an XML document so you can build your own XML applications. The Simple API for XML (SAX) defines parsing methods and Document Object Model (DOM) defines a mechanism for accessing and manipulating well-formed XML. The third is the Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) that you will use to build a simple SAX and DOM parser. The two parsers you will develop effectively echo the input XML structure. Usually, you will want to parse XML to perform some useful function, but simply echoing the XML is a good way to learn the APIs.

JAXP has the benefit ...