Parsing XML Using Document Object Model(DOM)

Chapter 7

Parsing XML Using Document  Object Model(DOM)

IN THIS CHAPTER

• What Is DOM, Anyway?

• What DOM Is Not

• Why Do I Need DOM?

• Disadvantages of Using DOM

• DOM Levels

• DOM Core

• DOM Traversal and Range

• Other DOM Implementations

• Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB)

Up to now, we have been talking about the basics of XML. You know what an XML doc-ument looks like as well as the difference between well-formed and validated documents. Also, we have looked at several schema representations. There are tools that you can use to create XML documents and ways to exchange these documents with commercial soft-ware, such as databases and word processors. But what if you want to work with XML documents programmatically? How do you go about writing your own software that cre-ates and reads an XML document?

As you know, XML is made up of human-readable text, so you can write your own code to manipulate XML. As you can probably guess, lots of people want to do this, so there are standard ways of working with XML. You don’t have to write a lot of the code your-self. Two of the most common tools for working with XML are the Document Object Model (DOM) and the Simple API for XML (SAX).

In this chapter, we will explore DOM and look at several examples. We will look at JDOM, a Java-centric API that is similar to DOM. We will explore JAXB (or Java API for XML) binding. This is an effective way to map Java objects to XML directly using automatically generated classes. Finally, we will consider a real-world application of DOM by building an XML data server.