SAX

creation of your own custom object model

creation of a class that listens to SAX events and properly creates your object model.

Note that these steps are not necessary with DOM, because DOM already creates an object model for you (which represents your information as a tree of nodes).

In the case of DOM, the parser does almost everything, read the XML document in, create a Java object model on top of it and then give you a reference to this object model (a Document object) so that you can manipulate it. SAX is not called the Simple API for XML for nothing, it is really simple. SAX doesn't expect the parser to do much, all that the SAX requires is that the parser should read in the XML document, and fire a bunch of events depending on what tags it encounters in the XML document. You are responsible for interpreting these events by writing an XML document handler class, which is responsible for making sense of all the tag events and creating objects in your own object model. So you have to write:

your custom object model to " hold " all the information in your XML document into. a document handler that listens to SAX events and makes sense of these events to create objects in your custom object model.

SAX can be really fast at runtime if your object model is simple. In this case, it is faster than DOM, because it by passes the creation of a tree based object model of your information. On the other hand, you do have to write an SAX document handler to interpret all the SAX events.

The events fired by the SAX parser are really very simple. SAX will fire an event for every open tag, and every close tag. It also fires events for #PCDATA and CDATA sections. Your document handler has to interpret these events in some meaningful way and create your custom object model based on them. Your document handler will have to interpret these events and the sequence in which these events are fired is very important. SAX also fires events for processing instructions, DTDs, comments, etc. But the idea is still the same, your handler has to interpret these events and the sequence of the events and make sense out of them.

Domain Name Search