Question

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.

Answer 1

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