Introduction to JAXP

Commercial parsers are available that provide proprietary implementations of the DOM or the SAX API specification. For example, Apache provides its Xerces parser and IBM provides its own set of XML parsers. For vendor-neutral parsing, you can use the Java API for XML Processing (JAXP). JAXP offers a common interface for creating and using standard SAX and DOM parsers in Java language, regardless of any specific vendor implementation.

JAXP allows you to plug in any proprietary parser that follows either the DOM or SAX API specification to parse XML documents. However, JAXP does not provide any new parsing functionality. JAXP also provides support for transforming XML documents into other formats, such as HTML, with its transform package.

 

The graphic shows how JAXP implements vendor-neutral parsing to process XML documents.
Click the Next button to continue.