As hobby, I'm coding my own download manager in java, which needs Html parsing and node functionality. Also, the idea of parsing software seems powerful, so I'm generally interested in becoming moderately fluent with one. I'm trying to choose which free software to invest my energy in. I believe in the bandwagon approach: predict which software has a future and jump on board. Googling, I found Javacc and Javacc Html Parser
This combination makes it routine for me to extract all links from a Html page without learning Javacc. However I still have to parse the links and build the desired tree of nodes. The Javacc documentation is difficult to digest. I haven't been able to find any "ground up" comprehensive tutorials, which suggests that Sun (and the programming community) are not bandwagoning around Javacc.
Superficially, Antlr (www.antlr.org/) seems to have put more recent effort into their documentation. I was intrigued by a June 27, 2004 weblog on ANTLR vs. JavaCC.
Request opinions for newbie choosing between the two. Will Antlr be easier to learn? Is Javacc more powerful? Is a lexer based on DFA (Javacc) rather than LL (Antlr) (whatever DFA and LL mean) superior (whatever that means)?
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