In the assignment 1, one has to read and write to the XML file. This can be
done by file I/O and string manipulation, which can be a little tedious. So,
there are few standard java xml apis available to process an XML file. For
example, Java library has in-built XMLReader API. But, the two
most popular are DOM (Document Object Model) and SAX (Simple API for XML). For
detail information on processing XML with java please refer to http://www.cafeconleche.org
The Xerces-java package contains both the apis, DOM and SAX.
*******Information on Xerces-Java********
Xerces is a XML Parser in Java. It contains two standards for processing XML files, viz. Dom and SAX.
The main web page of Xerces-Java project is http://xml.apache.org/xerces2
The Xerces-J-bin-2.7.1 package (including jar file) for any platform can be downloaded from following location
http://www.apache.org/dist/xml
Some DOM and SAX samples are available on http://xml.apache.org/xerces2
API Java Doc is on the link http://xml.apache.org/xerces2
Important Note:
The J2SE version 1.4.0 or later do contain a bundled JAXP implementation based on Apache "Xerces" library (mentioned above), but it may not be the latest. Actually, the earlier versions included less popular "Crimson" reference implementation for JAXP 1.1. These bundled libraries will work very fine and can be used for this assignment. If one wants to go a step further and use the latest library, then it is best to get it directly from the above mentioned website.
J2SE 5.0 includes API packages for DOM and SAX. Go to http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/xml/jaxp/index.html to access the API for SAX and DOM.