Easy to use
Standards compliant
Complete XPath integration
Flexible implementations
Handle very large documents
Easy to use
We think that an XML framework for Java should be simple, easy to use
and intuitive for a Java programmer.
We want to take the best features from DOM and SAX and put them
together into a new unified API which is optimised the for the Java
platform.
Standards compliant
We want to fully support DOM and SAX together with existing
Java platform standards such as the Java 2 Collections and J2EE.
Complete XPath integration
We want complete XPath support integrated into the API and for it to
be very easy to use. XPath is the ideal technology for navigating
around XML documents simply and easily without writing lines and lines
of code.
Flexible implementations
We want to be able to support very flexible, performant and
memory efficient implementations of XML documents.
So we want the API to be based on Java interfaces just like the Java 2
Collections framework.
Just as no single List implementation will suffice (the JDK comes
with at least 3) we believe we need a framework allowing plug and play
XML document implementations.
For some users, using a LinkedList performs better than an ArrayList
because their usage characteristics differ.
Others like to use a Vector as it is synchronized.
We believe an XML model should have the same flexibility.
Handle very large documents
One of the primary goals of dom4j is to be a flexible XML
framework for Java which supports most users needs whether that be
fast and efficient parsing with small memory overhead, processing
very large documents or using the latest XML features such as XPath,
XSLT and XML Query.
We found that we often needed to move from DOM to SAX to
handle very large documents or to move from SAX to DOM to handle
complex documents.
Our aim is for dom4j to be the only framework you really need
on the Java platform and for it to be a good citizen supporting and
integrating with existing standards fully.
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