SAX2

Why Choose SAX?

SAX gives you the flexibility to approach application design with your own trade-offs and goals in mind. High-level APIs often make many of those trade-offs for you, but not necessarily in ways that are best for your problems. In particular, SAX lets you design lightweight, task-oriented XML solutions, which can fit into small systems or scale up to large ones. Just having such options can be an important reason to choose SAX over generic APIs that work only at a high level. While initial deployment platforms might be richly featured, this won’t necessarily be true for all the systems you need to support, or for the ones your customers want you to support.

Compared to other parser-level APIs, SAX has two unique structural features: its efficient event-stream processing model and its data structure flexibility. These give you more control over the results of your parse.

Stream-Based Processing

SAX is the API to use when you need to stream-process XML to conserve memory and, in most cases, CPU time. In SAX, handler interfaces call application (or library) code for each significant chunk of XML information as it’s parsed. These chunks include character data, elements, and attributes. Each event passes information to your code, which can save it or ignore it as appropriate. These handlers see document information as a stream of such event calls, in “document order.” Applications can process data incrementally, rather than in one big chunk, and they can discard information ...