XML and Java: Developing Web Applications, Second Edition

2.5 Summary

In this chapter, we showed various approaches to parsing XML documents with Xerces and how to choose the appropriate ones for your application. For example, for the type of XML document, you should consider the following:

• Is it well-formed or valid? (See Section 2.2.3.)

• Does it contain namespaces? (See Section 2.3.1.)

• Is a DTD or XML Schema used? (See Section 2.3.2.)

For the API to access the structure of the document, you can choose an appropriate API based on the discussion in Section 2.4.3:

• Tree-based: DOM (see Section 2.4.1)

• Event-based: SAX (see Section 2.4.2)

Furthermore, for the API to parse XML documents, you have two choices (we discussed them in Section 2.3.4):

• Xerces native API

• JAXP API

To determine these choices, you should consider the characteristics of (1) the Web application you want to develop, (2) the XML documents, and (3) the platform where the application is running. Many examples in this book can help you to make decisions for your design and development tasks.

In the next chapter, we show you how to generate and serialize XML documents.