These days, the widespread adoption of XML and Web Services seems to finally fulfilling the promises made by early adopters of the late 1990's, with companies like eBay, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft releasing Web Services-driven APIs with great fanfare, and hordes of organizations latching on to the interoperability features offered by these technologies. Yet to truly exploit their advantages, one must be able to perform a variety of tasks such as validation, parsing, transformation, and storage, not to mention effectively work with this information via a programming interface.

To streamline these tasks, the Apache XML project provides several APIs for working with XML and Web Services. Pro Apache XML is devoted to a thorough introduction of several subprojects found under this umbrella. Each chapter is devoted to a specific subproject, covering its purpose, API, implementation and practical use through appropriate code examples. Though a beginner may wish to read the book from cover to cover, an advanced reader may jump to any desired subproject for a detailed study of its implementation. All programming examples use the Java programming language.