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The JAXP APIs

The main JAXP APIs are defined in the javax.xml.parsers package. That package contains two vendor-neutral factory classes: SAXParserFactory and DocumentBuilderFactory that give you a SAXParser and a DocumentBuilder, respectively. The DocumentBuilder, in turn, creates DOM-compliant Document object.

The factory APIs give you the ability to plug in an XML implementation offered by another vendor without changing your source code. The implementation you get depends on the setting of the javax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory and javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory system properties. The default values (unless overridden at runtime) point to the reference implementation.

The remainder of this section shows how the different JAXP APIs work when you write an application.

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