Document Object Model

In Chapter 5, you wrote an XML file that contains slides for a presentation. You then used the SAX API to echo the XML to your display.

In this chapter, you'll use the Document Object Model (DOM) to build a small application called SlideShow. You'll start by constructing and inspecting a DOM. Then see how to write a DOM as an XML structure, display it in a GUI, and manipulate the tree structure.

A DOM is a garden-variety tree structure, where each node contains one of the components from an XML structure. The two most common types of nodes are element nodes and text nodes. Using DOM functions lets you create nodes, remove nodes, change their contents, and traverse the node hierarchy.

In this chapter, you'll parse an existing XML file to construct a DOM, display and inspect the DOM hierarchy, convert the DOM into a display-friendly JTree, and explore the syntax of namespaces. You'll also create a DOM from scratch, and see how to use some of the implementation-specific features in Sun's JAXP implementation to convert an existing data set to XML.

First though, we'll make sure that DOM is the most appropriate choice for your application.

Note: The examples in this chapter can be found in <INSTALL>/j2eetutorial14/examples/jaxp/dom/samples/.