Design of a Pull and Push Parser System for Streaming XML

Abstract

An XML parser facilitates in simplifying the process of manipulating XML documents. The two commonly used models for parsing XML are pull and push. The Simple API for XML (SAX) is the industry standard for parsing based on the push model. However, no standard exists for pull parsing. In this paper we propose the design, API and implementation, XML Pull Parser 2.0 (XPP2), that allows for both pull and push based parsing. We discuss the various features of SAX and provide a description of existing technologies to parse XML. We describe our implementation of this API and show how a SAX driver can be built on top of XPP2.