What is the simplest and minimalistic java xml api?

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,

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

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