Simple API For XML (SAX)

Definition - What does Simple API For XML (SAX) mean?

The Simple API for XML (SAX) is a programming interface that acts as an event-based sequential access parser application programming interface (API) for XML documents. It provides an abstract interface in which the XML information set (infoset) is processed in a linear sequence of method calls.

SAX is a de facto standard that was released on May 11, 1998. The project was started by parser authors Tim Bray and David Megginson, and the initial draft was developed by Megginson.

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Techopedia explains Simple API For XML (SAX)

SAX provides a streaming interface in which applications get the infoset from XML documents in a linear and continuous stream. Previously accessed data cannot be reread, because SAX is unidirectional and does not allow for backtracking. SAX conducts a search of large documents to fetch small pieces of information. It also provides a mechanism to abort the process once the information is located. SAX is a simpler and faster interface than the document object model (DOM).

The benefits of using SAX are as follows:

SAX consumes less memory, as it collects the information from the document as a single stream. Therefore, the entire document does not need to be loaded into memory at once, allowing SAX to parse a file of any size.
SAX has the advantage of fetching a small subset of information from a large document and is able to ignore unnecessary data.
SAX makes it possible to get the required piece of information from a document as rapidly as possible.

Although there are many benefits to adopting SAX technology, it has its own set of drawbacks:

It does not support random access to the document. (It can be difficult to use SAX on documents that contain many internal cross-references.)
It does not provide lexical information. It is read-only.

SAX was initially developed as a joint effort by the members of the XML-DEV mailing list. The SAX project was recently shifted to the SourceForge project infrastructure. This was done to continue the further development and maintenance of SAX.