Using XML with Legacy Business Applications

Simple API for XML

SAX isn't a “real” standard in that it hasn't been blessed by any standards body, but the SAX implementations probably follow SAX no more or less than people's DOM implementations conform to the W3C Recommendation. Again, SAX is based on an event-driven model that uses callbacks for each type of XML construct it encounters in an input stream. Unlike the DOM, SAX just reads a data stream in serially and triggers events. It doesn't build a tree (or anything, for that matter) in memory. Thus it can be quite appropriate if you have to process very large XML documents that would consume considerable memory if processed using the DOM.

Several API libraries for Java and C++ support SAX, so it is widely available. However, a major ...