What Java XML library do you recommend (to replace dom4j)?

Asked 2009-05-06T21:29:54.667

I'm looking for something like dom4j, but without dom4j's warts, such as bad or missing documentation and seemingly stalled development status.

Background: I've been using and advocating dom4j, but don't feel completely right about it because I know the library is far from optimal (example: see how methods in XSLT related Stylesheet class are documented; what would you pass to run() as the String mode parameter?)

Requirements: The library should make basic XML handling easier than it is when using pure JDK (javax.xml and org.w3c.dom packages). Things like this:

Read an XML document (from file or String) into an object, easily traverse and manipulate the DOM, do XPath queries and run XSLT against it.
Build an XML document in your Java code, add elements and attributes and data, and finally write the document into a file or String.

I really like what dom4j promises, actually: "easy to use, open source library for working with XML, XPath and XSLT [...] with full support for DOM, SAX and JAXP." And upcoming

java xml dom4j

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3 Answers

In a recent project I had to do some XML parsing, and ended up using Simple Framework, recommended by a colleague.

I was quite happy with it in the end. It uses an annotation-based approach of mapping XML elements and attributes to Java classes and fields.

<example>
  <a>
    <b>
      <x>foo</x>
    </b>
    <b>
      <y>bar</y>
    </b>
  </a>
</example>

Corresponding Java code:

@Root
public class Example {

   @Path("a/b[1]")
   @Element
   private String x;

   @Path("a/b[2]")
   @Element
   private String y;
}

It's all quite different from dom4j or XOM. You avoid writing silly, boilerplatey XML handling code, but at first you'll probably bang your head against a wall for a while trying to get the annotations right.

(It was me who asked this question 4 years ago. While XOM seems a decent and quite popular dom4j replacement, I haven't come to fully embrace it. Curious that no-one had mentioned Simple Framework here. I decided to fix that, as I'd probably use it again.)

answered 2013-06-11T10:32:13.003

In our project we are using http://www.castor.org/ but just for small XML files. It's really easy to learn, needs just a mapping XML file (or none if the XML tags match perfectly class attributes) and it's done. It supports listeners (like callbacks) to perform additional processing. The cons: it is not a Java EE standard like JAXB.

answered 2009-05-06T21:42:21.313

For building XML documetns, I suggest xmlenc. It is used in cassandra.

answered 2012-07-12T06:14:03.467

What Java XML library do you recommend (to replace dom4j)?

3 Answers

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