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> ## When to Use SAX

> When it comes to fast, efficient reading of XML data, SAX is hard to beat. It requires little memory, because it does not construct an internal representation (tree structure) of the XML data. Instead, it simply sends data to the application as it is read -- your application can then do whatever it wants to do with the data it sees.

> In effect, the SAX API acts like a serial I/O stream. You see the data as it streams in, but you can't go back to an earlier position or leap ahead to a different position. In general, it works well when you simply want to read data and have the application act on it.

> It is also helpful to understand the SAX event model when you want to convert existing data to XML. As you'll see in Generating XML from an Arbitrary Data Structure, the key to the conversion process is modifying an existing application to deliver the appropriate SAX events as it reads the data.

> But when you need to modify an XML structure -- especially when you need to modify it interactively, an in-memory structure like the Document Object Model (DOM) may make more sense.

> However, while DOM provides many powerful capabilities for large-scale documents (like books and articles), it also requires a lot of complex coding. (The details of that process are highlighted in When to Use DOM.)

> For simpler applications, that complexity may well be unnecessary. For faster development and simpler applications, one of the object-oriented XML-programming standards may make the most sense, as described in JDOM and dom4j.

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