Tutorials : XML Made Easy with XOM :

XML Made Easy with XOM

by Leonard Anghel

XOM is the acronym for XML Object Model and it was developed by Elliotte Rusty Harold as an alternative to the existing solutions for processing XML documents. It supports important technologies as XSLT, XPath, namespaces, XInclude, Canonical XML, and it depends on an underlying SAX parser to process XML documents. As Mr. Harold says: "XOM it is an open source (LGPL), tree-based API for processing XML with Java that strives for correctness, simplicity, and performance, in that order." You can add to these that XOM is small, very easy to install, and very flexible.

In this article, you will see how to:

• Create XML with XOMSerialize XML with XOM
• Parse and navigate into an XML with XOM
• Validate an XML with XOM
• Use a SAX parser with XOM
• Use XPath with XOM
• Use XSLT with XOM

Downloading and Installing XOM

XOM is a JAR library named xom-1.1.jar that can be installed by copying it in the /ext directory of your Java distribution (or, you can put it in your classpath).

Creating an XML with XOM

As you can see, this XML (named AirWings_xml.xml) contains elements, attributes, namespaces, and a DTD declaration. Before generating this XML, is important to know how to:

• Create the XML document with a root-element:

  Element root = new Element("company");
  Document doc = new Document(root);
  

• Append a child-element to its parent:

  Element companyname = new Element("company-name");   
  companyname.appendChild("AirWings");
  root.appendChild(companyname);
  

• Create an attribute and add it to its owner:

  Element flyfrom = new Element("fly-from");
  Attribute year = new Attribute("year","2005");
  flyfrom.addAttribute(year);
  

• Create a namespace and an element that belongs to a namespace:

  final String register = "http://www.airwings.org/register/";
  Element companydetails = new Element("mc:company-details",register);
  

• Create a DTD declaration:

  DocType doctype = new DocType("company", "AirWings_xml.dtd");
  doc.insertChild(doctype, 0);
  

• Display the generated XML:

  String result = doc.toXML();
  System.out.println(result);
  

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