Creating a DOM tree from scratch using Java DOM API.

DocumentTreeExample.java

import java.util.*;

import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException;

import org.w3c.dom.DOMException;
import org.w3c.dom.Document;
import org.w3c.dom.Node;
import org.w3c.dom.Element;

public class DocumentTreeExample {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws DOMException {
        System.out.println("Initialising DOM tree...");
        try {
            Document doc = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder().newDocument();
            System.out.println("Tree ready.");

            // create the root element node
            Element element = doc.createElement("root");
            doc.appendChild(element);

            // add element after the first child of the root element
            Element itemElement = doc.createElement("item");
            element.appendChild(itemElement);

            // add an attribute to the node
            itemElement.setAttribute("attrkey", "attrvalue");

            if(doc == null)
                System.err.println("doc is NULL!");
            else
                System.out.println("doc is NOT NULL");
            
            System.out.println(doc); // out: [#document: null]
            System.out.println(doc.getDocumentElement().getTextContent()); // out: (doesn't print anything)
        } catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {
            System.err.println(e);
        }
        System.out.println("---\nTerminated");
    }
}