XOM is a library. By itself, it doesn't do much of anything. It exists only to be used by other programs. It requires Java 1.6 or later. To install it you'll need to place the XOM JAR archive somewhere in your CLASSPATH. This archive is the file named something like xom-1.3.9.jar. (The version number may have changed if I've forgotten to update this document.) You can either put it in your jre/lib/ext directory, add xom-1.3.9.jar to your CLASSPATH environment variable, or use the -classpath option when invoking javac and java. To check your download you can run one of the sample programs found in the xom-samples.jar file. For instance, nu.xom.samples.PrettyPrinter class formats an XML document by inserting and removing white space around element boundaries. You can run it from the command line like this: $ java -classpath xom-samples.jar:xom-1.3.9.jar nu.xom.samples.PrettyPrinter filename.xml XOM's supporting libraries including xalan.jar, xercesImpl.jar, and xml-apis.jar, are found in the lib directory. The versions shipped with XOM are quite a bit faster and less buggy than the ones bundled with the JDK, so you may well want to use them. For example, $ java -classpath xom-samples.jar:xom-1.3.9.jar:lib/xml-apis.jar:lib/xercesImpl.jar nu.xom.samples.PrettyPrinter filename.xml junit.jar is only used for testing, and is not needed for normal operation of XOM. If you want to build XOM from source, you need Apache Ant 1.6 or later. See https://ant.apache.org/. Once Ant is installed, building should be as simple as typing "ant compile" or "ant jar" in the xom directory. Type "ant help" to see other possible options. ======================================================================= XOM is Copyright 2004, 2005, 2009, 2018-2023 Elliotte Rusty Harold This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library. If not, see You can contact Elliotte Rusty Harold by sending e-mail to elharo@ibiblio.org. Please include the word "XOM" in the subject line. For more information see https://xom.nu/ or ask a question on the xom-interest mailing list.