Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

XML

Java 1.4 and Java 5.0 have added powerful XML processing features to the Java platform:

org.xml.sax

This package and its two subpackages define the de facto standard SAX API (SAX stands for Simple API for XML). SAX is an event-driven, XML-parsing API: a SAX parser invokes methods of a specified ContentHandler object (as well as some other related handler objects) as it parses an XML document. The structure and content of the document are fully described by the method calls. This is a streaming API that does not build any permanent representation of the document. It is up to the ContentHandler implementation to store any state or perform any actions that are appropriate. This package includes classes for the SAX 2 API and deprecated classes for SAX 1.

org.w3c.dom

This package defines interfaces that represent an XML document in tree form. The Document Object Model (DOM) is a recommendation (essentially a standard) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A DOM parser reads an XML document and converts it into a tree of nodes that represent the full content of the document. Once the tree representation of the document is created, a program can examine and manipulate it however it wants. Java 1.4 includes the core module of the Level 2 DOM, and Java 5.0 includes the core, events, and load/save modules of the Level 3 DOM.

javax.xml.parsers

This package provides high-level interfaces for instantiating SAX and DOM parsers for parsing XML documents.

javax.xml.transform