The Open Source Zone

XOM™ is a new XML object model. It is an open source (LGPL), tree-based API for processing XML with Java that strives for correctness, simplicity, and performance, in that order.

XOM is designed to be easy to learn and easy to use. It works very straight-forwardly, and has a very shallow learning curve. Assuming you're already familiar with XML, you should be able to get up and running with XOM very quickly.

XOM is the only XML API that makes no compromises on correctness. XOM only accepts namespace well-formed XML documents, and only allows you to create namespace well-formed XML documents. (In fact, it's a little stricter than that: it actually guarantees that all documents are round-trippable and have well-defined XML infosets.) XOM manages your XML so you don't have to. With XOM, you can focus on the unique value of your application, and trust XOM to get the XML right.

XOM is fairly unique in that it is a dual streaming/tree-based API. Individual nodes in the tree can be processed while the document is still being built. The enables XOM programs to operate almost as fast as the underlying parser can supply data. You don't need to wait for the document to be completely parsed before you can start working with it.

XOM is very memory efficient. If you read an entire document into memory, XOM uses as little memory as possible. More importantly, XOM allows you to filter documents as they're built so you don't have to build the parts of the tree you aren't interested in. For instance, you can skip building text nodes that only represent boundary white space, if such white space is not significant in your application. You can even process a document piece by piece and throw away each piece when you're done with it. XOM has been used to process documents that are gigabytes in size.

XOM includes built-in support for a number of XML technologies including Namespaces in XML, XSLT, XInclude, and Canonical XML. XOM documents can be co nverted to and from SAX and DOM.