<soaprpc/>

StAX features

I attended a Java by the Bay User Group meeting for the first time yesterday, and was pleasantly surprised by the wide range and quality of the presentations... the free pizza, courtesy Sun, wasn't too bad too!

• Jeff Sutor talking on StaX
• Daniel Harlow/Vishnu Vettrivel on the MyAJAX framework. The flyer listed it as an open source framework for building AJAX application, but I couldn't locate it. Could someone post a link to it?
• Ramesh Mandava on 'Next Gen Web services'
• Jags Ramnarayan on Gemstone's distributed data caching
• and finally Nicholas Kaseem on Tango, which is Web services inter operability project between Sun's Java Web Services (JWS) engineers and Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)... more on this in a later post.

I've had some pull parser experience - primarily with kXML, so it wasn't a new area. However the StaX API has some neat ideas in it which I liked, such as filters. StaX allows you to define filters at the parser level, such as a filter for specific namespace. Using filters, the parser can skip over the stuff in the XML that the application doesn't want to look at... thus leading to far cleaner, and more performant code. Jeff's StaX presentation is on his blog.