Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

Using the SAX Parser

The DOM parser reads an XML document in its entirety into a tree data structure. For most practical applications, DOM works fine. However, it can be inefficient if the document is large and if your processing algorithm is simple enough that you can analyze nodes on the fly, without having to see all of the tree structure. In these cases, you should use the SAX parser instead. The SAX parser reports events as it parses the components of the XML input, but it does not store the document in any way—it is up to the event handlers whether they want to build a data structure. In fact, the DOM parser is built on top of the SAX parser. It builds the DOM tree as it receives the parser events.

Whenever you use a SAX parser, you need ...