The JAXP APIs

JAXP doesn't do any kind of processing  instead it provides a mechanism to obtain parsed XML documents employing SAX and DOM parsers . JAXP provides a mechanism to plug-in with various providers (supporting standard specifications for DOM, SAX and XSLT ). JAXP also specifies which provider to use.

Overview of the main JAXP API Packages

The libraries that define needed JAXP APIs are:

The SAX API is defined in org.xml.sax  package of JAXP-APIs. The "Simple API" for XML (SAX) is the event-driven, serial-access mechanism that does element-by-element processing. The API for this level reads and writes XML to a data repository or the Web. 

The DOM API is defined in org.w3c.dom package of JAXP-APIs. The DOM API is easier to use. It provides a  tree structure of objects. The DOM API are used to manipulate the hierarchy of application objects it encapsulates. 

The XSLT APIs defined in javax.xml.transform package of JAXP-APIs. The XSLT APIs let you convert XML data to into other forms. 

javax.xml.parsers --Description

Provides classes to  process  XML documents and supports two types of plugable parsers ie..SAX and DOM Here are the following classses defined in javax.xml.parsers package:

This package contains two vendor-neutral factory classes:SAXParserFactory (builds a SAXParser) and DocumentBuilderFactory (builds a  DocumentBuilder). 

TheDocumentBuilder further creates a DOM-compliant document object.

The factory APIs  enables to plug-in with the  XML implementation (provided by  any vendor without changing the source code). The obtained implementation  depends on the setting of the system properties of these factory classes javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory and javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory . The default values (unless overridden at runtime) point to the reference implementation.

JAXP1.4 supports:

SAX 2.0

The Simple API for XML (SAX) specification provides an event-based mechanism for parsing XML documents. Various interfaces are defined in JAXP to handle different kind of events. SAX 2.0 supports  name spaces and custom event filters. 

 

DOM Core Level II 

The Document Object Model (DOM) specification provides mechanisms to build and traverse  tree-based representation of a XML document. 

DOM Level I provided core mechanisms for traversing a tree and adding, deleting, and updating content. 

DOM Level II provides support for events, namespaces, etc. 

 

XSLT 2.0

The Extensible Stylesheet Transformation(XSLT) specification defines various scripting mechanisms to transform one XML document into another.