BEA's Streaming API for Java (StAX) Preview Release

BEA Systems Continues Leadership in Open Standards Innovation with Preview Release of Streaming API for Java (StAX)

New API Designed to Increase Developer Performance and Productivity, Making it Easier to Incorporate XML into Java

San Jose, California, USA. November 5, 2003.

BEA Systems, Inc., the world's leading application infrastructure company, today announced the public availability of a preview release of the Streaming API for Java (StAX), a new Java API designed to improve developer productivity and performance by making it easier to incorporate Extensible Markup Language (XML) into Java. Through its leadership in the creation of StAX, as well as its breakthrough XMLBeans technology, BEA continues to drive innovation in Java community standards, helping to make developers more efficient and decrease the complexity of new technologies in enterprise and Web services applications.

"StAX is a substantial improvement in the speed and simplicity of Java development, and can offer significant value in the proliferation of Web services," said Adam Bosworth, chief architect and senior vice president of Advanced Development at BEA Systems, Inc. "This API builds upon previous standards and innovations like XMLBeans to combine the best of all approaches for easily and powerfully manipulating XML. Through decreased memory usage and increased precision and control in XML and Java application development, StAX can provide new momentum within the developer community."

With the dramatic growth of XML-based applications such as Web services, accessing and manipulating XML documents from Java applications has become increasingly critical to the enterprise. Until now, most XML APIs for Java have fallen into one of two broad classes: event-based, streaming APIs like the Simple API for XML processing (SAX) or tree-based APIs like the Document Object Model (DOM).

Both of these approaches have significant advantages and disadvantages. For instance, SAX is fast and highly efficient but strips the developer of total control over the development process, often creating excess work. Conversely, tree-based DOM provides greater developer control but can be highly memory intensive, making it inappropriate for larger documents or memory-constrained environments.

StAX is designed to overcome many of the disadvantages of former methods by providing the efficiency of streaming APIs and the control of tree-based APIs. This new method represents a next generation of APIs -- pull parsing. Unlike SAX and DOM, StAX is bidirectional, and can allow programs to both read existing XML documents and create new ones. Unlike other event-based approaches, developers using StAX for XML document parsing can pull events, rather than handling events in callback, which can enable them to stop processing, skip ahead, or get subsections and, ultimately, help to gain precise control, thereby saving time and reducing overall development costs.

BEA served as Specification Lead for the past two years, driving the public review of StAX through the Java Community Process (JCP) to final approval as Java Specification Request (JSR) 173. The BEA preview release of StAX is the Specification's first compliant preview, and can provide developers with a suite of tests, tools and documentation designed to allow fully standardized implementation. BEA's preview release of JSR 173, StAX is available immediately to all developers free at http://dev2dev.bea.com/technologies/stax/index.jsp.

About BEA

BEA Systems, Inc. is the world's leading application infrastructure software company, providing the enterprise software foundation for more than 15,000 customers around the world, including the majority of the Fortune Global 500. BEA, Tuxedo, and its WebLogic(R) brand are among the most trusted names in business.

Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., BEA has 77 offices in 31 countries and is on the Web at http://www.bea.com/.

Contact

Susan Siegel
BEA Systems, Inc.
Tel: +1-408-570-8364
Email: susan.siegel@bea.com

Shoshana Deutschkron
Bite Communications, for BEA
Tel: +1-415-365-0394
Email: shoshana.deutschkron@bitepr.com

[Source: BEA Systems, Inc.
http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=pr01161.htm&FP=/content/news_events/press_releases/2003]

Prepared by Robin Cover for The XML Cover Pages archive. See details in the news story: "BEA Offers Preview Release of JSR 173 Streaming API for Java (StAX)."

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