This package provides classes that interface Saxon to an XML parser that supplies data in the form of a stream of events. It provides an interface, `PullProvider`, that is an abstraction over the pull parser interfaces provided on Java and .NET, and that can in principle be implemented by other data sources to deliver input documents as if they came from a parser.

This package is almost obsolete. Pull-mode processing of queries, when required at all, is generally done using the classes in the {@link net.sf.saxon.evpull} package, which deliver a stream of events as objects, rather than as simple integers (analogous to the two styles of pull processing interface in StAX).

The API, defined in class `PullProvider`, is loosely modelled on the StAX `XMLReader` API. It is not identical, because it is designed as an intimate and efficient interface that integrates with Saxon concepts such as the `SequenceIterator` and the `NamePool`. A class `StaxBridge` is available that provides the `PullProvider` interface on top of a StAX pull parser. In the .NET build, a similar class `DotNetPullProvider` interfaces Saxon to the Microsoft `XmlTextReader`.

A source of data delivered by a `PullProvider` may be presented either as a `PullSource` or as a `StaxSource`. Both these are accepted by any Saxon interface that allows a JAXP `Source` object to be supplied.

Additional implementations of `PullProvider` are available in `Saxon-PE` and `Saxon-EE`, specifically, implementations that deliver data by walking a Saxon tree structure (represented by class `NodeInfo`), and implementations that allow queries to be evaluated in pull mode, with lazy construction of temporary document and element nodes.

Some examples of application code using the pull interface with Saxon are provided in the `PullExamples.java` file in the samples directory.

Michael H. Kay
Saxonica Limited
10 June 2009