RE: Creating XML document

PC2 & Ben,

I am not sure SAX really "produces XML". Generally,
you can use SAX to process an existing document.
I have not spent enough time looking at the SAX
API to see whether their is some mechanism to
immediately serialize an event, but even if their is it
would be really tricky to validate the document without
adding a lot of overhead that SAX is supposed to
avoid.

SAX is basically an even-driven model -- as a document
is read, it generates events that are passed to your
program. Because of this it has a much smaller memory
footprint than a DOM-based parser because DOM,
which is tree-based, loads an entire document in memory
during processing. The advantage with DOM is that you
can randomly access information without spinning through
the whole document.

For what you describe, I would look at JDOM, which can
return SAX events a document stream. This makes it pretty
work well with other XML tools like XSL transformers and
also makes it easy to create files. It will take up memory
though, but it is a lot less memory intensive than XML4J or
Xerces, because it is optimized to work with Java data
types rather than the more esoteric W3C data types.

David Morris

>>> pclapham@core-mark.com 01/23/02 10:02AM >>>
SAX is a sequential method of producing XML that doesn't require
storing the
whole document in memory.  Roughly speaking you give the XML writer a
series
of events like "document starting", "Foo element starting",
"Characters
BAR", "Foo element ending", "document ending", and the writer outputs
the
equivalent well-formed XML.  (This would fit very well with the RPG
processing cycle if your XML structure was more than one level deep.)

Regards
PC2

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Akiba [mailto:asfour00@yahoo.com]
Sent: January 23, 2002 08:53
To: java400-l@midrange.com
Subject: RE: Creating XML document


Paul, thanks a lot. This was very informative. Could
you just throw a few more words on third option: SAX
input to XML writer. Is that what JAXP is
"suggesting"? Doesn't it involve DOM again?