In this tip, you'll learn how to convert DOM structures to SAX and JDOM to allow communication with applications that do not use DOM. The code listings demonstrate how to convert from DOM to an output stream for use by SAX, and how to convert from DOM to JDOM.

While there is no official implementation of the Simple API for XML (SAX) in PHP, PHP does provide a SAX-like method for working with both local and remote XML files. In this article, author Nicholas Chase shows you how to work with XML files in PHP by building and setting handler functions and creating a parser. He demonstrates SAX in PHP with a page-building exercise in which he crafts a page based on the result of an Amazon Web Services query.

Most serious books, tutorials, or discussions of XML processing for programmers mention, even if only in passing, DOM and SAX, the two dominant APIs for handling XML. A general discussion of XML programming which failed to mention DOM and SAX would be as neglectful of its duty as would a monarchical subject who, upon entering the royal chambers, failed to acknowledge the presence of the King and Queen. Failing to acknowledge the potentate is simply one of the things one must never do.

The SAX API is superior to the DOM API in many aspects of runtime performance. In this article we will explore using SAX to map XML data to Java. Because using SAX is not as intuitive as using DOM, we will also spend some time familiarizing ourselves with coding to SAX.

The first article in this series introduced SAX, the Simple API for XML. This article delves further into using SAX in your applications. First, you'll read about document type definitions (DTDs), which specify the structure of an XML document. You'll learn about LAX, the Lazy API for XML (developed for this article), which makes using SAX even simpler. You'll then see LAX applied in a small document-processing system that uses the same XML data to generate documents for multiple purposes.

A significant chapter in the history of XML is about to close. The current maintainer of SAX, David Megginson, will shortly be relinquishing his responsibilities. This week, we report on the debate to find a replacement.

SAX filters allow you to construct complex XML processing behaviors from simple, independent modules. In this tip, Uche Ogbuji introduces this important XML processing technique.

A SAX parser can be instructed to stop midway through a document without losing the data already collected. This is one of the most commonly mentioned advantages of a SAX parser over a DOM parser, which generally creates an in-memory structure of the entire document. In this tip, you'll parse a list of recently updated weblogs, stopping when you've displayed all those within a particular time range.

Most users of the libxml (aka gnome-xml) library tend to use the DOM style tree interface for reading documents. This is generally quite an easy interface to use, but can use quite a bit of memory. An alternative is to use the SAX interface in libxml, which is a port of the Simple API for XML library for Java.

The libxml library provides two interfaces to the parser: a DOM style tree interface, and a SAX style event based interface. Most users of the library choose the DOM interface due to its ease of use, however it does have a few drawbacks. The big drawback is that its memory usage is proportional to the size of the document, which can be a problem for large documents.

This preview of the second edition of XML by Example by Benoit Marchal gives a solid introduction to SAX, the event-based API for processing XML that has become a de facto standard. This preview tells when to use SAX instead of DOM, gives an overview of commonly used SAX interfaces, and provides detailed examples in a Java-based application with many code samples.

Although SAX (the Simple API for XML) parsers are handy tools for parsing XML content, developing and maintaining a SAX parser can prove difficult. In this article, Leon Messerschmidt shows you how to use the information contained in XML Schemas to generate source code for a skeleton SAX parser. You also learn techniques to accomplish common XML parsing tasks.

Even though every abstract description of SAX prominently mentions that it is an event-driven interface, very few SAX applications really use SAX for event-driven programming. Instead, SAX is mostly just a way to save memory while extracting data from an XML document. However, over asynchronous channels -- such as a socket that produces data over a long duration -- SAX is a wonderfully lightweight programming technique for parsing incoming messages.

Last month we began our exploration of more advanced SAX topics with a look at how SAX events can be generated from non-XML data. This month, we conclude the series by introducing SAX filters and their use in XML data transformation.

This tutorial examines the use of the Simple API for XML version 2.0.x, or SAX 2.0.x. It is aimed at developers who have an understanding of XML and wish to learn this lightweight, event-based API for working with XML data. It assumes that you are familiar with concepts such as well-formedness and the tag-like nature of an XML document. In this tutorial, you will learn how to use SAX to retreive, manipulate, and output XML data.

The problem: The XML documents you have to parse are getting too large to load the entire document tree into memory; performance is suffering. The solution: use SAX.