Preface (SAX2)

Think of this book as if it were really called Everything You Wanted to Know About SAX. It provides a quick tutorial, while also serving as a complete reference that explains how to use this popular XML API effectively and efficiently. You'll find motivations for every programming interface and see how to build components for your application (or specialized environment) on top of SAX.

The information in this book is based on the current version of the Java

language support for SAX2. For any further updates to SAX2, see the SAX web site at http://www.saxproject.org.

0.1. Who Should Read This Book?

If you are programming with XML in Java, or starting to do that, and you want to learn how to use SAX2 to its fullest, this book is for you. It assumes that you are familiar with Java programming and have a basic understanding of XML, including DTDs. You may have some exposure to DOM, an alternative parser API, but you need more efficient, or more complete, access to XML than you can get with such a generic tree structure API. Although there's a lot of interest in XML from server-side programmers, and this book includes some examples targeted at servlet-based systems, SAX2 is addressed to Java developers working on all scales, from embedded systems to enterprise applications.

Although versions of the SAX API have been provided for developers who use C/C++, Pascal, Perl, and Python, this book is not addressed to such developers except in the broad sense that good SAX programming idioms transcend the particular language used to express them.

This book is for Java programmers working with XML who need an efficient way of reading or generating XML documents. The simple API for XML (SAX)'s event-based approach provides an extremely streamlined set of tools for Java programmers.