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Questions:
why event, why not token or doohickey or thing?
why is it so complicated?
why no open and close methods? XML is not a stream?

I don't know :-) I didn't write the API's. But you are right, sometimes XML processing seems a bit more complicated than it should be.

XML is actually not ideally suited for stream processing, because without loading the entire document in memory, a lot of context information is lost

VTD-XML is better suited for processing XML than DOM and SAX

Most of the time I don't use sax, or stax because they're more complex to use than a few open source libraries I've found.

I use xstream to map objects to xml.
http://xstream.codehaus.org

When I am processing xml and I can't bind it my preferred library is XOM.
http://www.xom.nu/

Both xstream, and xom can process xml in parts so all the xml doesn't need to be in ram at once.

There is also jdom which is another tree based xml api that you may want to check out (personally I prefer xom but you may like jdom more).
http://www.jdom.org/

xom and jdom all suffer from excessive memory usages due to object allocations

Thanks a lot for all of these interesting comments. It is always inspiring to see new ways of doing "the same". There are so many XML frameworks (and Java frameworks in general) that it can be really hard to go through all of them one by one.

By the way, I prefer DOM4J over JDOM any time. Better performance, and it seems to be more flexible too.

DOM4J is not match for vtd-xml, (10x faster in a typical use case)

Interesting - I'll have to check out that vtd-xml :-) ... sounds promising!

i totally agree with anon2 vtd-xml is very fast (5 x to 12x faster than jdom)