Processing XML with Java™: A Guide to SAX, DOM, JDOM, JAXP, and TrAX

Building Parser Objects

Because XMLReader is an interface, it has no constructors. Instead you use the static factory method XMLReaderFactory.createXMLReader() to retrieve an instance of XMLReader. And there are two such methods in the XMLReaderFactory class:

public static XMLReader createXMLReader() throws SAXException 

public static XMLReader createXMLReader (String className)
 throws SAXException

The first one returns the default XMLReader implementation class. This is specified by the org.xml.sax.driver Java system property. Parser vendors are supposed to modify this method to return an instance of their own parser in the event that this property is not set, but in practice few vendors do this. Consequently, when running a program that relies ...