Java API for XML Processing

In computing, the Java API for XML Processing, or JAXP (/ˈdʒækspiː/ JAKS-pee), one of the Java XML Application programming interfaces (API)s, provides the capability of validating and parsing XML documents. It has three basic parsing interfaces:

In addition to the parsing interfaces, the API provides an XSLT interface to provide data and structural transformations on an XML document.

JAXP was developed under the Java Community Process as JSR 5 (JAXP 1.0), JSR 63 (JAXP 1.1 and 1.2), and JSR 206 (JAXP 1.3).

JAXP version 1.4.4 was released on September 3, 2010. JAXP 1.3 was end-of-lifed on February 12, 2008.

Perhaps the easiest part of JAXP to understand, the DOM interface parses an entire XML document and constructs a complete in-memory representation of the document using the classes modeling the concepts found in the Document Object Model(DOM) Level 2 Core Specification.

The DOM parser is called a DocumentBuilder, as it builds an in-memory Document representation. The javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder is created by the javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory. The DocumentBuilder creates an org.w3c.dom.Document instance - a tree structure containing nodes in the XML Document. Each tree node in the structure implements the org.w3c.dom.Node interface. Among the many different types of tree nodes, each representing the type of data found in an XML document, the most important include:

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