<p>I've used jdom in the past, and have looked briefly at XOM and <code>DOM4j</code>. Each seems to provide essentially the same thing, as they each provide a simplified wrapper over the (very obtuse) standard W3C DOM APIs.  </p>

<p>I know that JDOM went through some effort to develop a JSR and standardization process at one point, but as far as I know that effort never went anywhere.  All of the project appear to be in stasis with little new development in the past several years.</p>

<p>Is there a consensus as to which is the best?  Also what are the pros and cons of each ?</p>

[{'answer_id': 25701, 'author': 'Theo', 'author_id': 1109, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1109', 'pm_score': 4, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>I like <a href="http://www.xom.nu/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">XOM</a>, because I like the way Elliotte Rusty Harold thinks. Of the ones you mention I belive it\'s the one that strays away from the DOM standard API:s the most, but I consider that a benefit.</p>\n\n<p>I once implemented a DOM library for Cocoa, and XOM was my inspiration.</p>\n\n<p>I\'ve worked with JDOM as well, and there\'s absolutely nothing wrong with it, although I do prefer XOM.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 25983, 'author': 'Claude Houle', 'author_id': 244, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/244', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': "<p>It all depends on the feature set. If you want to benefit from an XSL Transformation Engine (Like Xalan) or an XPath Engine (Like Jaxen or Saxon) I would recommend sticking to the more popular framework available like Apache Xerces, JDOM.</p>\n\n<p>After that, it's all a matter of taste. I personnally use a W3C compliant ( org.w3c.* ) like Apache Xerces because they are common enough, reasonably fast and well supported by the Java Community.</p>\n\n<p>Of course, if you need blinding speed and do not care about XPath, XQuery or XSL, you can surely find yourself something that is much faster and/or resource-hungry. (i.e. A StAX Implementation)</p>\n"}, {'answer_id': 575759, 'author': 'Dan', 'author_id': 68473, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/68473', 'pm_score': 2, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>While <a href="http://www.dom4j.org/dom4j-1.6.1/guide.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">dom4j</a> is an old player, we have been using it for a while and haven\'t regret it yet. Strong features: simplicity, xpath support and others. \nWeak sides: yet to support java 5.0, but version 2.0 has been finally announced.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/25614', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/1432/']