http://xml.apache.org/commons/components/external/: xml-commons provides an Apache-hosted set of DOM, SAX, and JAXP interfaces for use in other xml-based projects. Our hope is that we can standardize on both a common version and packaging scheme for these critical XML standards interfaces to make the lives of both our developers and users easier. The External Components portion of xml-commons contains interfaces that are defined by external standards organizations. For DOM, that's the W3C; for SAX it's David Megginson and sax.sourceforge.net; for JAXP it's Sun. 
/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 * 
 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 * 
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */

// $Id: XMLEvent.java 669794 2008-06-20 05:13:36Z mrglavas $

package javax.xml.stream.events;

import java.io.Writer;

import javax.xml.namespace.QName;
import javax.xml.stream.Location;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamConstants;
import javax.xml.stream.XMLStreamException;

public interface XMLEvent extends XMLStreamConstants {
    public Characters asCharacters();

    public EndElement asEndElement();

    public StartElement asStartElement();

    public int getEventType();

    public Location getLocation();

    public QName getSchemaType();

    public boolean isAttribute();

    public boolean isCharacters();

    public boolean isEndDocument();

    public boolean isEndElement();

    public boolean isEntityReference();

    public boolean isNamespace();

    public boolean isProcessingInstruction();

    public boolean isStartDocument();

    public boolean isStartElement();

    public void writeAsEncodedUnicode(Writer writer) throws XMLStreamException;
}