CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaxmlxml-serialization
yura
yura

Reputation: 14645

What is the simplest and minimalistic java xml api?

There are many pretty good json libs lika GSon. But for XML I know only Xerces/JDOM and both have tedious API. I don't like to use unnecessary objects like DocumentFactory, XpathExpressionFactory, NodeList and so on. So in the light of native xml support in languages such as groovy/scala I have a question. Is there are minimalistic java XML IO framework?

PS XStream/JAxB good for serialization/deserialization, but in this case I'm looking for streaming some data in XML with XPath for example.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 287

Answers (7)

Cjxcz Odjcayrwl
Cjxcz Odjcayrwl

Reputation: 22847

NanoXML is very small, below 50kb. I've found this today and I'm really impressed.

Upvotes: 0

Nirmit Shah
Nirmit Shah

Reputation: 758

try VTD-XML. Its almost 3 to 4 times faster than DOM parsers with outstanding memory footprint.

Upvotes: 1

Michael Kay
Michael Kay

Reputation: 163262

JDOM and XOM are probably the simplest. DOM4J is more powerful but more complex. DOM is just horrible. Processing XML in Java will always be more complex than processing JSON, because JSON was designed for structured data while XML was designed for documents, and documents are more complex than structured data. Why not use a language that was designed for XML instead, specifically XSLT or XQuery?

Upvotes: 0

Sean Patrick Floyd
Sean Patrick Floyd

Reputation: 298818

Dom4J rocks. It's very easy and understandable

Sample Code:

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    final String xml = "<root><foo><bar><baz name=\"phleem\" />"
                     + "<baz name=\"gumbo\" /></bar></foo></root>";

    Document document = DocumentHelper.parseText(xml);

    // simple collection views
    for (Element element : (List<Element>) document
            .getRootElement()
            .element("foo")
            .element("bar")
            .elements("baz")) {
        System.out.println(element.attributeValue("name"));
    }

    // and easy xpath support
    List<Element> elements2 = (List<Element>)
        document.createXPath("//baz").evaluate(document);
    for (final Element element : elements2) {
        System.out.println(element.attributeValue("name"));
    }
}

Output:

phleem
gumbo
phleem
gumbo

Upvotes: 1

skaffman
skaffman

Reputation: 403441

The W3C DOM model is unpleasant and cumbersome, I agree. JDOM is already pretty simple. The only other DOM API that I'm aware of that is simpler is XOM.

Upvotes: 3

aviad
aviad

Reputation: 8278

Deppends on how complex your java objects are: are they self-containing etc (like graph nodes). If your objects are simple, you can use Google gson - it is the simpliest API(IMO). In Xstream things start get messy when you need to debug.Also you need to be carefull when you choose an aprpriate Driver for XStream.

Upvotes: 0

Nils Weinander
Nils Weinander

Reputation: 2131

What about StAX? With Java 6 you don't even need additional libs.

Upvotes: 2

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