Xerces-J contains many useful samples to help you get up-and-running with writing XML applications. Many of the sample programs are even useful as standalone programs to help in testing the validity of XML documents and/or debugging applications.

The samples are organized either by API or by programming area in the following categories:

• DOM Samples
• SAX Samples
• JAXP Samples
• Socket Samples
• UI Samples
• XNI Samples

Running the sample applications requires that you have already installed the Java Development Kit (JDK) or Java Runtime Environment (JRE) on your computer and extracted the Xerces-J software.

If you do not already have a JDK already on your computer download one from Oracle's Java website: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index.html or from IBM's website http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/jdk/. The sample applications described in the following pages support Java 1.x (e.g. 1.1.8, etc) and/or Java 2 (e.g. 1.2.2, 1.3, etc). The UI samples are written using Swing and require Java 2 in order to run but all of the command line programs will run using Java 1.x.

Command lines examples on the following pages use the Windows path separator ';' (semicolon) and directory separator '\' (backslash). On UNIX, use the ':' (colon) character to separate the JAR files in the classpath, and replace Windows directory separator '\' (backslash) with '/' (forward slash).