Update There is no ready XML parser in Java community which can do NIO and XML parsing. This is the closest I found, and it's incomplete: http://wiki.fasterxml.com/AaltoHome

I have the following code:

InputStream input = ...;
XMLInputFactory xmlInputFactory = XMLInputFactory.newInstance();

XMLStreamReader streamReader = xmlInputFactory.createXMLStreamReader(input, "UTF-8");

Question is, why does the method #createXMLStreamReader() expects to have an entire XML document in the input stream? Why is it called a "stream reader", if it can't seem to process a portion of XML data? For example, if I feed:

<root>
    <child>

to it, it would tell me I'm missing the closing tags. Even before I begin iterating the stream reader itself. I suspect that I just don't know how to use a XMLStreamReader properly. I should be able to supply it with data by pieces, right? I need it because I'm processing a XML stream coming in from network socket, and don't want to load the whole source text into memory.

Thank you for help, Yuri.