Wednesday, January 14, 2009

JDOM vs DOM4J

Bear in mind, JDOM and DOM4J are java API for XML processing. JDOM is open source pure Java API for XML processing. JDOM is not an extension or wrapper over W3C DOM model. JDOM is an object model in java that stands for XML document that is the same model as of DOM. JDOM does use SAX API with XML parser (Xerces or Crimson or any other) at the back end to establish the in-memory tree based model.
Note: JDOM uses the defaults parser of JAXP as it calls the parser through JAXP, however, it can be changed to any other parser (Please see the previous post).
You can find this description on the following this link. Like DOM and unlike to SAX, JDOM provides random access to contents of the document hence allowing to update it. JDOM is compatible for conversion to DOM Model or SAX Events and vice versa. Please see this. Unlike DOM, JDOM doesn’t work through interfaces rather it has concrete classes for different components of the model i.e. node, element, attributes etc.
DOM4J, on the other hand like DOM, has done it other way round than JDOM. DOM4J is also XML Processing APIs and follow the same tress based object model for XML document. DOM4J works through interfaces rather than concrete classes. That’s the major difference between DOM4J and JDOM. DOM4J makes navigating along the tree easier than JDOM due to this difference. DOM4J also provides some support for XPath (which, unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to explore).
The purpose of this and the last three posts is to have a clear understanding of what is what in the area of XML Parsing. I haven’t provided any code here because there is huge coding stuff available on the web for this purpose. I’ll get back to each of them with more detail some other time (fingers crossed!!).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

JDom also supports XPath. Has for years.