XML Im-/Exporter

XML Im-/Exporter is a low level library to assist you in the straight forward process of importing and exporting XML from and to your Java classes. All of this is designed having performance and simplicity in mind. XML Im-/Exporter consists of three parts explained in the following.

XML encoding and decoding helpers on the character (not the byte) level

Set of methods to encode and decode characters special to XML (like & and < and " and ').

Writing data to formatted XML

You can write your data into a formatted XML writer. Formatting and encoding is done as straight forward as possible. Everything you know better than this class must be done by you. In effect, no unexpected so called intelligent behavior is to be feared. Another effect is high speed and simplicity.

Structured reading of XML

Simple and fast importer for XML configuration or import files. It is based on SAX and can be considered an extension to it. This means it is callback oriented and does not build an internal data structure like the DOM. While SAX is simple, fast, and memory friendly it might be a bit too rudimentary for most tasks. SimpleImporter adds more high level means for importing XML while preserving the SAX's benefits. These are the main extensions to the SAX:

Every callback includes a full path to the XML element: In many cases this will make maintaining local stacks for keeping track of element histories obsolete.
Leading character data can be included into start element callback: In many cases import files do not or only rarely contain mixed content. If so it is convenient to have the the full content of an element at hand with a single callback.
More than one listener can be registered: Some XML files contain different types of data that may be interesting to different listeners. E.g. data to import from a server may contain error messages along with the real content data. It may be convenient to processes these blocks of data seperately.

SimpleImporter is meant to take the place of tools like digester from the apache pepole and similar ones. So, if you are satisfied with these tools, stick to them, forget about SimpleImporter. But if you, like me, prefer simple and explicite tools that do their job over rather complex, implicit, rule based tools like digester, SimpleImporter may be just right.

XML Im-/Exporter website on Sourceforge
XML Im-/Exporter project page on Sourceforge
Javadocs

Copyright

February 2003