Installation


	Unpacking the Files

Xerces-J is packaged as a ZIP file for all platforms and operating systems. The parser release is also packaged as Tar GZip files as a convenience for UNIX users. You can extract the ZIP files using the Java jar command to unpack the distribution.


	jar xf Xerces-J-bin.2.1.0.zip jar xf Xerces-J-src.2.1.0.zip jar xf Xerces-J-tools.2.1.0.zip

All of these commands create a sub-directory called "xerces-2_1_0" in the current directory, except for the command to unpack the "tools" distribution, since you may install this anywhere you like.


	Files in the Binary Package

LICENSE	License for Xerces-J
Readme.html	Web page redirect to docs/html/index.html
xercesImpl.jar	Jar file containing all the parser class files that implement one of the standard API's supported by the parser
xmlParserAPIs.jar	Jar file containing all the standard API's implemented by the parser. Currently, Xerces-J supports DOM level 2, SAX 2.0 R2 PR1, and the `javax.xml.parsers` part of JAXP 1.1.
xercesSamples.jar	Jar file containing all sample class files
data/	Directory containing sample XML data files
docs/	Directory containing documentation
docs/javadocs/	Directory containing Javadoc API for parser framework
samples/	Directory containing the source code for the samples

To use Xerces-J you do not need the source files. However, if you want to recompile the sources you need to download the source package and have the contents of the tools package (or equivalent) available.

xerces.jar is no longer available in the main distribution. You can still download this jar from deprecated distribution. xerces.jar is a Jar file that contains all the parser class files.


	Files in the Source Package

LICENSE	License for Xerces-J
build.bat	Batch file for invoking Ant build for Windows users
build.sh	Shell script for invoking Ant build for UNIX users
build.xml	Ant build file -- read README file before building
README	Build instructions
Readme.html	Web page redirect required for building documentation
STATUS	Current source code status information
TODO	Current list of "todo" items
ISSUES	Current open issues that need to be resolved
data/	Directory containing sample XML data files
docs/	Directory containing documentation, in XML form
samples/	Directory containing source code for samples
src/	Directory containing source code for parser and supplemental APIs

In order to compile the source code using Ant or to build the release distributions yourself, you must have the contents of Xerces-J-tools.2.1.0.zip on your classpath; i.e., you will need access to a version of ant, xalan, StyleBook and an XML parser such as xerces. For ease of use, we recommend extracting Xerces-J-tools.2.1.0.zip in your xerces root directory; the build.sh and build.bat scripts are written for this case.


	Changes in Xerces jar files

In order to accomodate the very common case in which xerces is used with an XSL processor such as xalan, between Xerces 2.0.0 beta 3 and beta 4 a change in the default organization of xerces's jar files was introduced. As well as the xercesSamples.jar file, which we still produce, xerces formerly came with a file called xerces.jar. This file contained all of the parser's functionality. Two files are now included: xercesImpl.jar, our implementation of various API's, and xmlParserAPIs.jar, the API's themselves. This was done so that, if your XSLT processor ships with API's at the same level as those supported by Xerces-J, you can avoid putting xmlParserAPIs.jar on your classpath.

Should you wish to use the xerces.jar instead, we have included several ant targets for backward compatibility. An "ant target" is an argument given to ant, our build tool, that tells it which portions of the build.xml file to apply.

If you are on a Windows system and you wish to get only the xerces.jar file, you would execute build.bat deprecatedjars.

If you want to regenerate new versions of the xerces binary, source and tools distributions with the old-style jarfiles, you would execute build.bat deprecatedall. The situation is analogous for Unix users, except that build.sh would be used instead of build.bat.

For further information and more options, please look inside build.xml itself; all possibilities are documented there.