XML and Java: Developing Web Applications, Second Edition

5.1 Introduction

Unlike DOM, the SAX specification is not authorized by W3C. SAX was developed through the xml-dev mailing list, the largest community of XML-related developers. The development of SAX was finished in May 1998. SAX 2.0, which introduced namespace support and the feature/property mechanism, was completed in May 2000.

As described in Chapter 2, SAX is an event-based parsing API. Its methods and data structures are much simpler than those of DOM. This simplicity implies that application programs based on SAX are required to do more work than those based on DOM. On the other hand, SAX-based programs can often achieve high performance.

In this chapter, we describe some tips for using SAX. Then we compare DOM and SAX, and introduce sample programs using DOM and SAX.