The Structure of an XML Document

An XML document has a hierarchical structure made up of elements, subelements, subsubelements, and so on. You will notice that many of the SAAJ classes and interfaces represent XML elements in a SOAP message and have the word element or SOAP (or both) in their names.

An element is also referred to as a node. Accordingly, the SAAJ API has the interface Node, which is the base class for all the classes and interfaces that represent XML elements in a SOAP message. There are also methods such as SOAPElement.addTextNode, Node.detachNode, and Node.getValue, which you will see how to use in the tutorial section.