Customer Reviews

Java and XML

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

Two APIs discussed in the second edition - JDOM and JAXB - saw important changes between the prerelease versions and their eventual final releases. These changes are covered in this latest edition. This book is organized into three sections. The first section, composed of Chapters 1 and 2, is a basic introduction to XML and related standards. However, the introduction is fast-paced, and if you have not seen XML before it probably won't be enough. The second part of the book - Chapters 3 through 11 - explains a wide variety of APIs for creating, manipulating, outputting, and pretty much doing anything else to XML documents. If you already know XML and Java, these chapters are excellent. If not, again, you are going to have difficulty as the material is fast paced. The last section - Chapters 12 and 13 - describes two important applications for XML. Chapter 14 stands alone as a chapter of predictions about the future of XML. The following is a description of the book in the context of the table of contents:

Chapter 1, Introduction, begins with the basics of XML. If you've never used XML before, this chapter will give you all the information you need to understand the rest of the book. It briefly touches on the changes between XML 1.0 and 1.1 before introducing XSLT and XPath.

Chapter 2, Constraints, covers three ways of defining the structure of XML documents: DTDs, W3C XML Schemas, and RELAX NG schemas. It covers how to use these standards to define a structure and how to ensure that a document matches that definition. It also covers how to convert between the various constraint document types.

Chapter 3, SAX, the Simple API for XML (SAX) is introduced in this chapter. The parsing lifecycle is explained, and the events that can be caught by SAX and used by developers are demonstrated via code examples.

Chapter 4, Advanced SAX, covers less-used but still powerful items in SAX. You'll learn how to use SAX features and properties to alter the behavior of the SAX parser, use XML filters to chain callback behavior, use XML writers to output XML with SAX, and look at some of the less commonly used SAX handlers like LexicalHandler and DeclHandler.

Chapter 5, DOM, unlike SAX has its origins in the World Wide Web Consortium. Whereas SAX is public domain software, DOM is a standard just like the actual XML specification. The DOM is designed to represent the content and model of XML documents across all programming languages and tools. In this chapter you learn DOM basics, find out what is in the current specification (DOM Level 3), and how to read and write DOM trees.

Chapter 6, DOM Modules, is about the various Level 2 and Level 3 DOM modules like Traversal, Range, Events, Style, HTML, Load and Save, and Validation.

Chapter 7, JAXP, examines the Java API for XML Processing (JAXP), including the XPath and Validation APIs introduced with JAXP 1.3. JAXP was initially a very small API that handled only parsing. The latest version of JAXP provides everything in SAX and DOM, plus some extras, and JAXP makes vendor neutrality much easier than using DOM or SAX directly.

Chapter 8, Pull Parsing With StAX, concerns The Streaming API for XML (StAX), which is the newest standard Java XML API. You'll learn how to use StAX and how it compares to both SAX and DOM. There is also a brief look at a precursor to StAX named XMLPull, which is still in use.

Chapter 9, JDOM, examines a Java-specific object model API. JDOM provides a means of accessing an XML document within Java through a tree structure, and in that respect is somewhat similar to the DOM.

Chapter 10, dom4j, examines another Java-specific object model API, dom4j. This chapter compares it to both JDOM and DOM. Also examined are features unique to dom4j, like its object-orientated transformation API.

Chapter 11, Data Binding with JAXB, talks about how with data binding, your application code does not concern itself with the details of XML documents, only a Java object model. Sun has developed a standard for XML data binding: the Java Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB). In this chapter, you'll learn about JAXB 1.0 and 2.0, as well as the general basics of data binding and when its use is appropriate.

Chapter 12, Content Syndication with RSS, covers using XML documents to syndicate content. Specifically, the RSS standards are examined along with a brief discussion of Atom. The creation and reading of RSS feeds using other APIs are discussed as well as an RSS-specific API named ROME. A highlight is the creation of your own podcast feed for submission to Apple's iTunes Podcast directory using this tool.

Chapter 13, XML As Presentation, looks at a variety of techniques for using XML in visual portion of web applications. The chapter shows how XML is a key component of the dynamic web application techniques that are becoming more common.

Chapter 14, Looking Forward, provides some brief overviews of several XML technologies. Included topics are XML appliances, XQuery, and Fast Infoset.

Appendix, SAX Features and Properties, details the features and properties available to SAX 2.0 parser implementations.

A good companion to this book is "Processing XML with Java(TM): A Guide to SAX, DOM, JDOM, JAXP, and TrAX" by Elliot Rusty Harold. The book is a little older, so standards have changed, but it does a good job of explaining things at a slower pace than this book. This book is better for the newer standards and applications. If you are working with XML and Java, you should probably have both books.

This is probably the best book currently out about working directly with XML and Java. It seems to be the most up to date with respect to coverage of the most commonly used Java XML APIs. The book gives a good overview of SAX, StAX, DOM, JDOM, dom4j, and JAXB. In reading the book, I got a good sense of the ideas behind the different API's. I also got a good sense of and when and how to use them. After looking through many other Java-XML books, this one is my first choice. The book still functions well for me as a reference when I have an XML processing task that I need to do in Java.

I'm not using the technology in this book right now, and just wanted an overview of Java and XML together. I never expected this book to be super-in-depth, if it was covering this broad space in a book that isn't huge.

The good points: I found the book fairly easy to read for at least the first third of the book. The rest seemed a bit dry, but I think that is largely because I was getting out of my depth. Once I'd worked with the early material some, I think the later material would have been more readable.

I got the information I was looking for, which was an overview of XML and how it connects to other tools in real life. The book also had lots of ideas for further reading. Handy.

The bad points: The author seems to have a blatant open-source bias. While that isn't shocking in a Java book, it does come across as a bit unprofessional, is somewhat little minded, and is distracting from the key subject matter.

Also, while this was a good overview, I was left feeling that more could have been said about XML, Java, web services, and working with client-server architectures. Another reviewer mentioned that these chapters were dropped from a previous edition. I will probably be looking for that previous edition to see if I like it better.

Of several XML books I've looked through, this is the only one so far I would consider buying. However, I will also be considering getting a more in-depth book for my bookshelf after checking this one out of the library for an introduction to the subject.

This book was probably useful back in 2000. Unfortunately, a lot has changed since then, and some of the information in this book is now flat our wrong.

For example the chapter about DOM objects was not updated to include information about recent api releases. So when the book says there is no simple way to serialize a DOM object, that simply is no longer true. You can now do it with the JAXP api.

The book has other problems as well. For example, the section that describes the difference between XSL and XSLT is extremely misleading and not helpful at all.

This is one of the few books that I intend to return

This edition was published in Dec. 2006, so when I bought it Jul. 2007 it was the freshest book on the topic that I found. There are a lot of different Java XML tools with overlapping funtions SAX, DOM, JAXP, JAXB, Castor, JDOM, dom4j . . . This really help sort them out.

I had purchased the 2nd edition a few years back and I felt it was a great XML book for the times. This year I'm starting to use SOAP and other XML web services so I purchased the 3th edition hoping for updated chapters on the subject. Boy was I surprised to find out chapters on XML-RPC, SOAP and Web Services were dropped from the book. What were they thinking? The other chapters are too basic for the times and very disappointing.

The 2nd edition has 509 pages and the 3rd edition has 465 pages. I am glad O'Reilly is saving trees but I purchase my books for subject matter and information. I think the next editions should have more pages not less.

A note for Brett & Justin: Please add the missing chapters back and you will have a good book, again. (Brett did Justin ask you to remove the chapters?)

I am returning this edition. (Never returned a book before)

the author doesnt do complete coverage on topics he mentioned. jaxp with xpath topics is 30-40% done. jaxb topic which i interested most is 30-40% done. instead of doing complete coverage, he wasted time on topics like StaX, dom4j, and chapter 12. LOL, this book is a joke.

I thought the second edition was fairly well written, even if it rambled a bit. That was mostly a consequence of XML still being in a state of flux, and the author made a good effort to at least mention and describe all the moving pieces.

I recommended this book to a friend, who picked up the current (third) edition. I began to study it in more detail because of some of the questions he was asking. The third edition lacks what cohesiveness the second edition had. I agree with the one poster's comments about code fragments - it is much more difficult to keep track of where you're at if you're trying to work through the examples. The second addition displayed classes in their entirety, highlighting the new code as they went - very easy to keep track of context and overall functionality. And if you're not trying to work through the examples, then you really have no idea if the author is doing a good job of explaining/teaching or not.

The second edition also provided an XML file to use so your results would match the book. I can't find anyplace in the third edition where an XML file is provided for input. I have no idea what you're supposed to use to try to get the results the author shows in the book. Major oversight.

It's too bad the second edition really is too far out of date to recommend - it's a far better written book. I would look elsewhere before I'd buy the third edition.

As a Java programmer (not a web developer) that is interested in exploring the use of XML (for non-web based applications), this book is useless. Most books outline basic concepts and then provide examples with explanations of how these examples work and what they do. The following quote from the beginning of chapter 3 (page 41) demonstrates the author's take on this convention:

'I'm increasingly of the "learning is best done by doing" philosophy, so I'm not going to hit you with a bunch of concept and theory before getting to code. SAX is a simple API, so you only need to understand its basic model, and how to get the API on your machine; beyond that, code will be your best teacher.'

This loosely translates to "I'm just going to throw a bunch of samples at you. You can use trial and error (or read other books) to figure out what's going on."

If you are already familiar with using Java and XML together, then it might be interesting to read about the author's take on the topic. If, however, you want to learn how to use Java and XML together, the only thing this book really provides is a bunch of plugs for other O'Reilly books that (presumably) contain the information that is missing from this one.

While I have never much liked this book, I have found this better than the others I have and the book I turn to most.

I didn't know much about XML when I started, but I am now proficient at using the StAX parser thanks to this book. So there is some proof in the pudding there. The explanations and examples were sufficient, although not particularly expansive. The book provided me with enough knowledge to know which parser I needed to use, and I also a liked this book's coverage of JAXB.

I have Processing XML with Java(TM): A Guide to SAX, DOM, JDOM, JAXP, and TrAX, which doesn't cover Stax or JAXB (perhaps for good reason?) so I found it useless. Further I have Pro XML Development with Java Technology where I found the examples too encompassing, that is it requires you to become intimately involved with each example in order to follow it.

So compared to the other two books, Java & XML was the easiest book to use for learning, and the one that I would recommend for using Java and XML.