Android; are there any disadvantages to using XML parsing frameworks over SAX/DOM?

Question

I'm experimenting with REST and XML on an Android application, primarily to create a REST client

For handling XML returned from a given REST service, I'm tempted to use a simple framework such as XStream. This allows me to easily map an object onto XML and vice versa, it doesn't come with the memory overhead like DOM, and requires considerably less coding that SAX

Can anyone offer any disadvantages to going down such route?

Answer 1

1. XStream's code may or may not work on Android
2. It's own JAR adds ~400KB to your app size
3. Depending on which of the dependencies you need, they may or may not work on Android and will add up to an additional 2.5MB to your app size

Answer 2

I find you can do most stuff by using XMLPullParser and extending it as required. It comes bundled with the SDK too. http://developer.android.com/reference/org/xmlpull/v1/XmlPullParser.html