Java and XML, Second Edition

DOM Level 2 Modules

Now that you’ve seen what the DOM and the Level 2 core offering provide, I will talk about some additions to DOM Level 2. These are the various modules that add functionality to the core. They are useful from time to time, in certain DOM applications.

First, though, you must have a DOM Level 2 parser available. If you are using a parser that you have purchased or downloaded on your own, this is pretty easy. For example, you can go to the Apache XML web site at http://xml.apache.org, download the latest version of Xerces, and you’ve got DOM Level 2. However, if you’re using a parser bundled with another technology, things can get a little trickier. For example, if you’ve got Jakarta’s Tomcat servlet engine, you will find xml.jar and parser.jar in the lib/ directory and in the Tomcat classpath. This isn’t so good, as these are DOM Level 1 implementations and won’t support many of the features I talk about in this section; in that case, download a DOM Level 2 parser manually and ensure that it is loaded before any DOM Level 1 parsers.

Warning

Beware of the newer versions of Tomcat. They do something ostensibly handy: load all jar files in the lib/ directory at startup. Unfortunately, because this is done alphabetically, putting xerces.jar in the lib/ directory means that parser.jar, a DOM Level 1 parser, will still be loaded first and you won’t get DOM Level 2 support. A common trick to solve this problem is to rename the files: parser.jar becomes z_parser.jar, ...