Java: parse XML from the web smartly

Up until recently, I used to fetch the entire XML document before parsing it. I've found that that can be extremely unhealthy for your application, especially if you're developing on Android, where resources are scarce and the GC is very unforgiving. The optimal way to parse XML is to parse it while it's loading, so that resources are freed much more efficient. Here's a snippet of code that demonstrates how to do this: URL oUrl = new URL(sUrl); SAXParserFactory spf = SAXParserFactory.newInstance(); SAXParser sp = spf.newSAXParser(); XMLReader xr = sp.getXMLReader(); MyXMLHandler handler = new MyXMLHandler(); xr.setContentHandler(handler); xr.parse(new InputSource(oUrl.openStream()));

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This way, XML is parsed as it comes in, and the application is much faster and smoother. Also, if you don't parse the whole XML this is an even greater improvement, because you can stop parsing when you have enough data (by throwing a SAXException) and it will even stop loading data, which results in faster load times and less bandwidth usage.