Java contains several methods to access XML. The following is a short overview of the available methods.

Java provides the DOM API (Document Object Model). In DOM your access the XML document over an object tree. DOM can be used to read and write XML files.

SAX (Simple API for XML) is an Java API to sequential reading of XML files. SAX can only read XML documents. SAX provides an Event-Driven XML Processing following the Push-Parsing Model. What this model means is that in SAX, Applications will register Listeners in the form of Handlers to the Parser and will get notified through Call-back methods. Here the SAX Parser takes the control over Application thread by Pushing Events to the Application. Both DOM and Sax are older API's and I recommend not to use them anymore.

Stax (Streaming API for XML) is an API for reading and writing XML Documents. Introduced in Java 6.0 and considered as superior to SAX and DOM.

Java Architecture for XML Binding ( JAXB ) is a Java standard that defines how Java objects are converted to/from XML (specified using a standard set of mappings. JAXB defines a programmer API for reading and writing Java objects to / from XML documents and a service provider which / from from XML documents allows the selection of the JAXB implementation JAXB applies a lot of defaults thus making reading and writing of XML via Java very easy.

The following will explain the Stax interface, for an introduction into JAXB please see JAXB tutorial .