EAServer 4.0 includes support for JAXP (Java API for XML Parsing) 1.1. The package includes the industry-standard DOM and SAX APIs, Crimson SAX and DOM parsers, and the Xalan XSLT transformer from Apache.
JAXP is an API that provides basic functionality for reading, manipulating, and generating XML documents and, depending on the needs of the application, gives developers the flexibility to swap between parsers without making code changes.
SAX (Simple API for XML) is an event-driven parser that invokes one of several methods supplied by the caller when a ‘parsing event’ occurs. “Events” include recognizing an XML tag, finding an error, encountering a reference to an external entity, or processing a DTD specification. It is used by many servlets and network-oriented programs because it is the fastest and least memory-intrusive mechanism currently available for dealing with XML documents.
DOM (Document Object Model) parser is a tree-like structure, where each node contains one of the elements from an XML structure. The tree is traversed to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of a document, which can then be incorporated back into the presented document page.
XSLT is a language for transforming one XML document into another XML document through the use of a formatting vocabulary.
You can find programming examples for each of these APIs in Sun’s The Java/XML Tutorial, available at http://java.sun.com/xml/tutorial_intro.html.
