You want to generate your own XML files or modify existing documents.

Use DOM or JDOM; parse or create the document, and call its write method.

Sun’s XmlDocument class has a write( ) method that can be called with either an OutputStream or a Writer. To use it, create an XML document object using the XmlDocument constructor. Create nodes, and append them into the tree. Then call the document’s write( ) method. For example, suppose you want to generate a poem in XML. Running the program and letting the XML appear on the standard output might look something like this:

$ jikes +E -d . DocWrite.java
$ java DocWrite
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<Poem>
  <Stanza>
    <Line>Once, upon a midnight dreary</Line>
    <Line>While I pondered, weak and weary</Line>
  </Stanza>
</Poem>
$

The code for this is fairly short; see Example 21-8.

import java.io.*;
import org.w3c.dom.*;
import com.sun.xml.tree.*;

/** Make up and write an XML document
 */
public class DocWrite {

    public static void main(String[] av) throws IOException {
        DocWrite dw = new DocWrite(  );
        XmlDocument doc = dw.makeDoc(  );
        doc.write(System.out);
    }

    /** Generate the XML document */
    protected XmlDocument makeDoc(  ) {
        try {
            XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument(  );

            Node root = doc.createElement("Poem");
            doc.appendChild(root);

            Node stanza = doc.createElement("Stanza");
            root.appendChild(stanza);
            
            Node line = doc.createElement("Line");
            stanza.appendChild(line);
            line.appendChild(doc.createTextNode("Once, upon a midnight dreary"));
            line = doc.createElement("Line");
            stanza.appendChild(line);
            line.appendChild(doc.createTextNode("While I pondered, weak and weary"));

            return doc;

        } catch (Exception ex) {
            System.err.println("+============================+");
            System.err.println("|        XML Error           |");
            System.err.println("+============================+");
            System.err.println(ex.getClass(  ));
            System.err.println(ex.getMessage(  ));
            System.err.println("+============================+");
            return null;
        }
    }
}

A more complete program, of course, would create an output file and have better error reporting. It would also have more lines of the poem than I can remember.

Sun’s XmlDocument class is not a committed part of the standard, which is why the code imports com.sun.xml.tree.* . However, other vendors’ APIs will likely have similar functionality. In Version 2 of the XML DOM API, you can use the new XMLReaderFactory.createXMLReader( ) , which takes the name of the parser as a string argument, which can in turn be loaded from a properties file (see Section 7.8). This avoids having the parser class name compiled into your application.