Pull-based APIs

Application does not process incoming events, but it pulls data from the processed file.

Can be used when programmer knows the structure of an input data and he can pull them off the file.

... opposite to event-based API.

Very comfortable to an application programmer, but implementations are usually slower the push event-based APIs.

Java offers the XML-PULL parser API - see Common API for XML Pull Parsing and also

newly develop API - Streaming API for XML (StAX) developed like a product of JCP (Java Community Process).