Surprised by behavior of SAXParserFactory

Question

I am surprised by what is going on when I get a new instance of the SAXParserFactory. It was all working well when I realized that I was creating a new factory and parser every time I needed to parse a new file (could be hundreds at a time). In order to avoid this, I added an "initialize()" method to get a new instance and create a new (global) parser. This initialize method was called by the class constructor, however, for some reason it just crashed (without giving an error, by the way). After playing around, I figured out that if I called "initialize()" in the constructor, it fails, but if I call it (seemingly) anytime after the constructor, it works just fine. See the code below for clarification:
        //  #### DOES NOT WORK ####
        public myParser(){
                initialize();
     private void initialize(){
          try {
                      SAXParserFactory factory = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();  // <-- FAILS HERE
                      factory.setValidating(false);
                      factory.setNamespaceAware(false);
               parser = factory.newSAXParser();
          } catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {
               // TODO Auto-generated catch block
               e.printStackTrace();
          } catch (SAXException e) {
               // TODO Auto-generated catch block
               e.printStackTrace();
     @Override
     public ImportRun parse(File file, boolean logErrors){
          try{
               log.info("Parsing file: " + file.getName());
               String fileString = readFile(file);
               parser.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(fileString)), new ContentHandlerParserRocheLC480v5(plateFormat, reactionMap, ir));
        //  #### WORKS ####
        public myParser(){
                initialize();
     private void initialize(){
          try {
                      SAXParserFactory factory = SAXParserFactory.newInstance();
                      factory.setValidating(false);
                      factory.setNamespaceAware(false);
               parser = factory.newSAXParser();
          } catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {
               // TODO Auto-generated catch block
               e.printStackTrace();
          } catch (SAXException e) {
               // TODO Auto-generated catch block
               e.printStackTrace();
     @Override
     public ImportRun parse(File file, boolean logErrors){
          try{
                        initialize();
               log.info("Parsing file: " + file.getName());
               String fileString = readFile(file);
               parser.parse(new InputSource(new StringReader(fileString)), new ContentHandlerParserRocheLC480v5(plateFormat, reactionMap, ir));
         }This is my main question, however, I clearly am not understanding how to use the SAX parser. Anyone who can shed light on the remainder of my problem will be much appreciated.
I have a separate project that makes use (imports) of this SAX parser and I can't get it to work. My Build Path (in eclipse) includes "xercesImple.jar." And to make things more difficult, I can't get the message from the FactoryConfigurationError thrown in SAXParserFactory.newInstance() to print out or be caught. I have looked through several examples, but don't see what I'm doing wrong.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Ok, so now I feel pretty silly. My entire question is bogus. The "initialize()" method is failing in both situations, I just didn't realize it. I also figured out that catching FactoryConfigurationError does in fact work. As dumb as that sounds, I'm almost certain that Eclipse gave me a compile error, but I guess it just hadn't recompiled.
Apparently my problem has been answered several times before. I had to put "xercesImple.jar" into /Library/Java/Home/lib/endorsed (on my Mac). If it were a PC, I would have put it in $JAVA_HOME/lib/endorsed. I found this answer on the following website: http://www.slamb.org/svn/repos/trunk/projects/axamol/sax-pipeline/README
If anyone has a better solution, or if what I did is not the best way to solve it, I would love to hear.
Apologies for wasting any time. Perhaps someone will benefit from the answer I posted, however.
Edited by: mebbert on Jun 17, 2008 9:36 PM