J2EE™ Web Services

Chapter 21. DOM 2

Document Object Model (DOM) is a set of interfaces and classes used to model XML documents as a tree of objects called nodes. The DOM interfaces and classes represent XML documents, elements, attributes, text values, and pretty much all the other constructs from the XML 1.0 language. You use the DOM programming API to examine existing XML documents, or to create new ones.

When an implementation of DOM parses an XML document, it reads the XML text from some source (a file, network stream, or database, for example), then builds an object graph, called a tree, that mirrors the structure of the XML document. Figure 21-1 shows the mapping between a DOM tree and an XML document based on the Address Markup Language used in Chapter 2 ...