Summary

In this chapter, you have taken a lightning tour through the main places where Java and XML meet. You started with the lowest level interfaces-the streaming pull and push parser APIs, SAX and StAX. Then you moved up a level to the various tree-structured document object models: DOM, JDOM, DOM4J, and XOM.

For data centric applications where the business logic resides in Java, you looked at Java XML data binding interfaces, typified by the JAXP specification. Then you examined the interfaces used to control high-level, XML-based languages such as XSLT and XQuery from a Java application framework.

Some of these APIs are covered in much more detail elsewhere in this book. For others, you have to go to the reference materials for the APIs, which can, in every case, be found online. Although there isn't enough detail in this chapter to enable you to write code using any of these interfaces, you should now have enough background to enable you to study the reference manuals. You have already acquired a broad understanding of the key concepts and, in particular, an understanding of the range of different interfaces available and their relationship to each other.