External Components

xml-commons provides an Apache-hosted set of DOM, SAX, and JAXP interfaces for use in other xml-based projects. Our hope is that we can standardize on both a common version and packaging scheme for these critical XML standards interfaces to make the lives of both our developers and users easier.

The External Components portion of xml-commons contains interfaces that are defined by external standards organizations. For DOM, that's the W3c; for SAX it's David Megginson and sax.sourceforge.net; for JAXP it's Sun. While we could send users to each of the primary sources for these deliverables, keeping our own versions of these in the xml-commons repository gives us a number of advantages:

• Simplicity of downloads: users get the whole product from one place.
• Better version control: we can only take fixes we want, and add Apache-specific changes.
• Better overview documentation of how these interfaces fit into the XML processing world.
• More chance for cross-project community building within Apache projects.

Currently, we provide just the native sets of javadoc from each of these external sets of code, plus whatever native documentation provided. We also include LICENSE and README files for each set of code from an external source.