The features we've covered so far are probably enough for 90% of SAX applications. But it's useful to know something of the rest of the features, for those occasions when they are needed. This section of the chapter gives a survey of these features and their intended purpose.

With MSXML 4.0, you can use SAX and DOM interchangeably. For example, a process might pass your application a DOMDocument or an IXMLDOMNode object.

Custom JSP tags. Lets you read and proceed XML files. This approach is similar to XMLTextReader stuff in .NET (actually this taglib uses SAX parser).

SAX-like Event Handlers for the Generic Parsing of ASN.1 Encoded [PDF]

This article introduces the idea of SIA and opens a series of papers dedicated to implementation of SIA classes and accompanying tools. The series of documents will explain reasons and benefits for using SIA as well as will provide examples of recommended practice for applications developers. A basic knowledge of XML, SAX and algebra is required.

The alternative is to think of the XML as a stream of nodes rather than a tree, where each time your code is called it gets told just one thing, that it's found one item - a start of a tag, a lump of text - and you code gets one chance to hand back modified XML. This is the SAX system.

Using the SAX parser is a completely different experience from using a DOM parser. Programming SAX is event driven programming. Programming DOM is tree traversal.

To use XML for <SCRIPT>'s SAX Parser, you need to include xmlsax.js from the jsXMLParser directory.

SAX and DOM are the standard APIs for XML parsing and they are supported by JDK 1.4+. Each of those two APIs has PROs and CONs, which are explained next. Why not mixing SAX and DOM to get maximum advantage?

SAX is referred to as an event-driven model or system. SAX parses an XML document and as it encounters the different parts of an element it performs different functions. The different functions performed depend on how the programmer sets up the code.

The basic outline of the SAX parsing APIs are shown at right. To start the process, an instance of the SAXParserFactory class is used to generate an instance of the parser.

SAX for Pascal is designed to implement the Simple API for XML Parsing in Pascal/Delphi

SAX for Pascal provides a specification, in the form of a set of Delphi interfaces, for parsing XML documents. Your client code receives a bunch of events that tell you the contents of the XML document. The main interface a SAX parser provides is IXMLReader (in the SAX.pas unit). This interface allows an application to set and query features and properties in the parser, to register event handlers for document processing, and to initiate a document parse.

SAX, the Simple API for XML, was the first standard API shared across different XML parsers. SAX is unique among XML APIs in that it models the parser rather than the document. In particular the parser is represented as an instance of the XMLReader interface. The specific class that implements this interface varies from parser to parser. Most of the time you only access it through the common methods of the XMLReader interface.

Perl module for using and building Perl SAX2 XML processors.

Sax.net Communications makes it easy to add scalable serial communications to all your .NET applications. Sax.net has a long history in serial communications, starting with the development of the very first MSComm control for Microsoft Visual Basic 2.0.

This step-by-step article describes how to create a stream of Simple API for XML (SAX) events from an existing Document Object Model (DOM) document object.

This HOWTO describes version 2 of SAX (also referred to as SAX2). Support is still present for SAX version 1, which is now only of historical interest; SAX1 will not be documented here.

Here are the results of my comparison of various SAX parsers and the XML Pull Parser, a non-SAX parser. Tests were done on a AMD Athlon/1.8Ghz with 512MB RAM running Windows XP and Java 1.4.2 The SOAP test documents were obtained from Aleksander Slominski's site.

SAX is a very popular XML processor API. It is lightweight, since it hardly offers any more features than are mandated by the XML specification. (Or, for SAX2, additionally implied by the XML Namespaces specification.) For more information about SAX, see the official web site or at least javadoc included with your SAX parser.