SAX VS DOM

DOM Stands for Document Object Model and it represent an XML Document into tree format which each element representing tree branches.

SAX Stands for Simple API for XML Parsing. This is an event based XML Parsing and it parse XML file step by step so much suitable for large XML Files.

Here are few high level differences between DOM parser and SAX Parser in Java:

1) DOM parser loads whole xml document in memory while SAX only loads small part of XML file in memory.

2) DOM parser is faster than SAX because it access whole XML document in memory.

3) SAX parser in Java is better suitable for large XML file than DOM Parser because it doesn't require much memory.

4) DOM parser works on Document Object Model while SAX is an event based xml parser.

I suggests use DOM parser over SAX parser if XML file is small enough and go with SAX parser if you don’t know size of xml files to be processed or they are large.