The Java XML APIs consist of the following separate programming APIs: Only the Java API for XML Processing is a required API in Enterprise Java Beans Specification 1.3.

A number of different software packages implement these APIs including

  • Xerces -- One of the original and still (in 2002) most popular SAX and DOM parser.
  • Crimson XML -- A faster SAX and DOM parser.
  • Xalan -- The original and still (in 2002) most popular XSLT/XPath implementations.
  • Sparta XML -- A fast and small SAX and DOM parser that also includes an XPath subset.