What Is JAXP?

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∟What Is JAXP?

This section provides a quick introduction of Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) that included in JDK 1.6.

What is JAXP? JAXP (Java API for XML Processing) is Java API that enables Java applications to parse, transform, validate and query XML documents independent of a particular XML processor implementation. JAXP provides a pluggability layer to enable vendors to provide their own implementations without introducing dependencies in application code. Using this software, application and tool developers can build fully-functional XML-enabled Java applications for e-commerce, application integration, and web publishing.

JAXP specification is maintained as JSR (Java Specification Requests) 206 by JCP (Java Community Process), see https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=206.

Here is the JAXP version history and related Java Platforms:

JAXP 1.6: Java Platform, Standard Edition 8 and above
JAXP 1.5: Java Platform, Standard Edition 7 and above
JAXP 1.4: Java Platform, Standard Edition 6 and above
JAXP 1.3: Java Platform, Standard Edition 5 and above

JAXP has been included in standard JDK package since JDK 1.4. You don't need to download anything JAR files separately to use JAXP.

JAXP API contains 3 groups of class packages:

1. Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) - The core interface packages.

Constants - Defines core XML constants and functionality from the XML specifications.
Datatype - XML/Java Type Mappings.
Namespace - XML Namespace processing.
Parsers - Provides classes allowing the processing of XML documents.
Transform - Defines the generic APIs for processing transformation instructions, and performing a transformation from source to result.
Transform DOM - This package implements DOM-specific transformation APIs.
Transform SAX - This package implements SAX2-specific transformation APIs.
Transform Stream - This package implements stream- and URI- specific transformation APIs.
Validation - Provides an API for validation of XML documents
XPath - Provides an object-model neutral API for the evaluation of XPath expressions and access to the evaluation environment.

2. Document Object Model (DOM) - DOM specific packages.

Core - DOM core interfaces.
Load and Save - Input and output related interfaces.
Events - Event handling interfaces.
HTML - HTML related interfaces.
Traversal - Traversal interfaces.
XPath - XPath related interfaces.

3. Simple API for XML (SAX) - SAX specific packages.

Core - SAX core interfaces.
Helper Classes - Contains "helper" classes, including support for bootstrapping SAX-based applications.
Extensions - Contains interfaces to SAX2 facilities that conformant SAX drivers won't necessarily support.