Originally posted by William Brogden:
Benefits of JAXP:
1. it is in EVERY Java SE library, no thrashing around trying to make sure your customers have the right external library in the right place.
2. it is a complete implementation of the w3c DOM
3. the "pluggable" architecture has been refined to where you can plug in your own parser if you absolutely have to
4. Java 5 contains many convenience classes and methods - considerably more than the previous releases - example - the java.util.Properties class now has a loadFromXML method!!
Bill
Most of what you have listed are benifits of JAXP
What about the extra complexity of DOM over a more Java centric Tree model like JDOM or dom4j, Does that not make the latter more attractive to use?
But I agree that once you have decided that Tree model representation of XML is not what you need JAXP's SAX and probably STaX look attractive.