JAXP: Another Player in Java-XML Game

JAXP stands for ‘Java API for XML Processing’. Please, don’t confuse it with other APIs like SAX, DOM, JDOM etc. JAXP is a set of APIs for XML processing making a rather abstract layer in the overall scheme of XML processing. SAX, DOM and JDOM are parsing APIs only, used in parsing of XML document, while JAXP has a broader spectrum of its application, it lets you parse, validate and transform XML documents, here we are concerned with the parsing feature of it however. Remember, JAXP is not parsing APIs nor is it a new way of XML handling in java. As a matter of fact, JAXP provides a convenient way of XML processing. As said before, JAXP exists at the abstract layer; it uses a parser behind the scenes for parsing purposes. JAXP is a bundle of some APIs and a parser. Previously, JAXP was bundled with Crimson parser as the default one; however, JAXP provides the facility to change to some other parser without recompiling the application which has several benefits. (Details can be found on the following link.) These parsers in turn implement SAX, DOM or some other parsing APIs. We are not going into much detail here; please refer to All About JAXP for detail on JAXP along with example code too, this tutorial on JAXP provides quite a comprehensive detail on JAXP highlighting its parsing and validation feature.