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Like it or not. XML has its place in IT. Every Java configuration file I have seen in the last few years is either a simple name/value property file or in XML. Also, Java processing has improved over the years. It became more and more simple to deal with it. Using something like Spring[2], there even is no need to read in XML yourself any more. However, if you have to, using SAX and also StAX you still have to keep track of XML events and their context. E.g., for many tasks you have to record the current XML element and sometimes even in which XML element it is in. This is necessary as you have to know where a certain text (PCDATA) event belongs to. This will require something like a stack. To be more precise, all XML documents can be described using S-grammars which are a strict subset of LL(1) grammars. And, as you know, ANTLR supports a superset of LL(1). This means all valid XML documents can easily be parsed by ANTLR using its LL
(*) algorithm and LL (*) grammars. The idea is to let StAX take the lexer part and write ANTLR3 parsers for every XML format you want to read in.
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