There are two major types of application programming interfaces (APIs) that can be used to parse XML:
Tree-based APIs map the XML document to a tree structure. The major tree-based API is the Document Object Model (DOM) maintained by W3C. A DOM parser is particularly useful if you are working with a deeply-nested document that must be traversed multiple times.
For more information about the DOM parser, see the W3C Document Object Model page.
Event-based APIs use callbacks to report events, such as the start and end of elements, to the calling application, and the application handles those events. These APIs provide faster, lower-level access to the XML and are most efficient when extracting data from an XML document in a single traversal.
For more information about the best-known event-driven parser, SAX (Simple API for XML), see the SAX page.
InfoMaker includes software developed by the Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/). The XML services for reports are built on the Apache Xerces-C++ parser, which conforms to both DOM and SAX specifications. For more information about SAX, see the Xerces C++ Parser page.
