StAX Use Cases

The StAX specification defines a number of use cases for the API:

• Data binding

  • Unmarshalling an XML document

  • Marshalling an XML document

  • Parallel document processing

  • Wireless communication

• SOAP message processing

  • Parsing simple predictable structures

  • Parsing graph representations with forward references

  • Parsing WSDL

• Virtual data sources

  • Viewing as XML data stored in databases

  • Viewing data in Java objects created by XML data binding

  • Navigating a DOM tree as a stream of events

• Parsing specific XML vocabularies

• Pipelined XML processing

A complete discussion of all these use cases is beyond the scope of this chapter. Please refer to the StAX specification for further information.