Standards like DOM and SAX were developed early on and provide a language-independent API for XML manipulation. As the technology matures, issues such as performance, ease of use, and productivity become important. While many consider XML the universal language for data, there is no such thing as a universal programming language.
Different languages have different capabilities and are optimized for certain tasks.
While DOM and SAX continue to dominate the development world, new language-specific APIs are emerging. One such API is JDOM , an open source project whose goal is to make XML manipulation easier for Java programmers. JDOM takes an intuitive approach to XML manipulation. Using an underlying SAX or DOM parser, an XML document is parsed and represented as a Document object. The root element of the Document object is your key to gaining access to the rest of the XML document.