Authoring XML Documents

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XML and Java

Any programming language can create or process an XML document. Java is no exception. XML is not a specification of a programming language, nor is it a programming language interface. Rather, it describes how an application can represent data for the benefit of another application. As such, XML is very programming language neutral. For example, there are no predefined XML data types other than quoted character strings.

A number of XML parsers written in Java are available. Some are free, and others are commercial products. IBM, Sun, and a group called OpenXML have been very active in publishing useful XML products and tools. You can incorporate one of these tools into your Java project or write your own parser and XML document generator.

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