I'm fairly new to Java and am writing an app that needs an XML config file. The problem I have is that there doesn't seem to be any easy way to do this, which seems a bit strange. I've looked SAX and DOM and both seem quite complicated. Are there any other good API's out there? What's the best way to do this in Java? Thanks...
A:
SAX and DOM are the "Standard" ways to approach parsing an XML file in Java.
There are alternatives to XML too.
Perhaps all you need is a properties file ?
Have you considered JSON?
FacilityDerek
2010-03-27 11:13:50
+1
A:
Hi user303135,
I would recommend the Commons Configuration library: http://commons.apache.org/configuration/index.html Take a look at the HOWTOs to see how easy it is to get some information from an XML file.
All other libs I know involve either operating on the DOM directly or registering handlers for SAX parsing (which both involve a high overhead of code). JAXB is also an alternative but doesn't involve less overhead code than the former two.
Max
Makkes
2010-03-27 11:27:09
Yeah, and of course: You should consider using sth. other than XML if you don't really want to take advantage of the XML capabilities. Properties files are the simplest of the alternatives.
Makkes
2010-03-27 11:28:14
+1
A:
I've written a very simple API for precisely this reason. It uses the DOM parser underneath, but exposes a very simple and easy-to-use API that allows you to get to the XML data really easily. It's just a single Java file that you can use as a library in your code. Hope that helps.
chris
2010-03-27 11:30:34
Thanks all for your replies. Commons Configuration looks quite good and seems pretty powerful, however, in the end I decided to use this solution in my app. The only negative thing about Commons Configuration is that it's quite heavyweight for just a simple bit of config. This solution is really lightweight and does everything I need. Thanks a lot for the link!
2010-03-27 18:54:03
A:
A nice alternative to parsing the file yourself (especially for configuration purposes) is to use Apache Commons Digester.
You simply nominate what parts of the XML file will trigger which setters/methods you require, and Digester will do the rest. You can build arbitrarily complex configurations and the 'parsing' code remains trivial.
e.g.
digester.addObjectCreate( "addresses/address", Address.class );
digester.addBeanPropertySetter( "addresses/address/addressLine1", "addressLine1" );
creates an Address object and sets the first line of the address. See this tutorial for more info.
Alternatively XStream offers (possibly) the simplest XML-to-object conversion available in Java. To create an instance of a (say) Configuration class from an input stream is a one-line operation.
Brian Agnew
2010-03-27 12:35:51