Many projects read XML configuration files to provide initialization of various Java objects within the system. There are several ways of doing this, and the Digester component was designed to provide a common implementation that can be used in many different projects.

Basically, the Digester package lets you configure an XML -> Java object mapping module, which triggers certain actions called rules whenever a particular pattern of nested XML elements is recognized. A rich set of predefined rules is available for your use, or you can also create your own.