Being new to the java xml related API's, there appear to be a lot of xml api's provided by Sun, as well as apache,...etc.
Actually, there's only one "standard" XML parsing API provided by Sun, namely JAXP. In practice, you write your code against JAXP APIs (javax.xml.parsers.*, org.xml.sax.*, and org.w3c.dom.*) and configure the JVM to use some
implementation of those APIs: Apache Crimson (which comes with JDK1.4) and Apache Xerces (most people/products out there use Xerces, which is Crimson's successor).
For those of you who've done SAX parsing in java, which libraries do you recommend?
Based on what I said above, I'd recommend the following:
Use the standard JAXP API unless you absolutely need some feature only available through product-specific APIsUse the Crimson parser implementation if you can rely on JDK1.4 being used (the easiest way) and unless you need some features only available in Xerces or some other implementation (schema validation comes to mind)