JAXP StAX

External

• Elliotte Rusty Harold introduction to StAX http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/09/17/stax.html

Internal

• JAXP

Overview

The StAX (Streaming) API provide streaming, event-driven, pull parsing for reading and writing XML documents, as an alternative to SAX push parsing and JAXP DOM full in-memory tree structure representation. StAX has an iterator-based API, where the programmer asks for the next element (pulls the event), and also a cursor-based API. In both cases, XML documents are treated as filtered series of events.

StAX parsers can be used for state-dependent processing, unlike SAX parses, which can only be used for state-independent processing.

StAX is a read/write API, XML documents can be read and written with StAX.

StAX offers a simpler programming model than SAX and more efficient memory management than JAXP DOM.

Difference between Pull Parsing and Push Parsing

Difference between Pull Parsing and Push Parsing

Cursor-Based API

The StAX cursor API represents a cursor with which one can walk an XML document from beginning to end. The cursor can point to one thing at a time, and always moves forward, usually one element at a time.

The main cursor interfaces are XMLStreamReader and XMLStreamWriter.

Cursor-based Parsing Example

Iterator-Based API

Iterator-based Parsing Example

StAX Example

StAX Example

Component Packages

• javax.xml.stream defines the XMLStreamReader and XMLStreamWriter interfaces.
• javax.xml.transform.stax provide StAX specific transformation APIs.