From the web site:

StAX is a standard XML processing API that allows you to stream XML data from and to your application. This StAX implementation is the standard pull parser implementation for JSR-173 specification.

  http://stax.codehaus.org/

It is an alternative to the venerable [SAX] and is much more powerful and robust than TAX (see [TAX Revisited] for an upgraded version, [TAX: A Tiny API for XML] for the original).

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[EKB] A comment copied from the TAX page:

[DAG] Just a note: actual [SAX] implementations also gulp the whole [XML] stream before processing, since are node oriented, and being the [XML] object always a node, this is read wholly before beginning parsing. StAX, on other end, is a pull-based parser, which is more stream oriented, and does not require to read the whole node before parsing it. I found it much better than [SAX].

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[Category XML]