XML Object Model Comparisons

This page attempts to survey the landscape of available XML object models and compare and contrast their features. The information in this table is correct to the best of our knowledge and we will try and keep this information as up to date as possible. If you think there's anything wrong, please let us know here.

Feature	WC3 DOM	dom4j	JDOM	Electric XML
Open Source	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Based on Java Interfaces	Yes	Yes	No	No
Supports Java 2 Collections	No	Yes	Yes	No
Can use any SAX parser and XMLFilter	Yes (usually)	Yes	Yes	Don't know
Convert to and from DOM trees	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Can implement DOM interfacs natively	Yes	Yes (optional)	No	No
Integrated XPath API support	No	Yes	No	Partial
Bundled XPath implementation	No	Yes	Optional	Partial
Support for JAXP/TrAX for XSLT integration	Yes	Yes	Optional	No
Event based processing support	Possible	Yes	No	No
Capable of processing a continuous XML streams	Don't know	Yes	No	No
Capable of processing massive documents	Don't know	Yes	No	No
XML Schema Data Type support	No	Yes (alpha)	No	No

Dennis Sosnoski has published an interesting article on IBM's developerWorks which compares the performance of a variety of XML document models for the Java platform including dom4j. You can find the very interesting results here.

Also you might find these new Performance Benchmarks interesting comparing dom4j and Jaxen against Xerces and Xalan.