Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

I had planned on using some tree-like Java classes as a Document Object Model, which would give me access to all sorts of XML and DOM tools like parsers and XSLT transformers. Initially, I thought all that would be neccessary is to implement all the DOM Interfaces in org.w3c.dom and then I would have a set of classes that conformed to DOM Level 1. It was my understanding that interfaces such as DOMImplementation and Document would interface with various XML tools, allowing creation of a class that implements Document and then Document would have its various factory methods that know how to create the various DOM nodes such as Element, Attr, Text, NamedNodeMap, NodeList, etc.

The problem I'm seeing now is that the JAXP specification (which is what the latest Xerces and Xalan tools conform to) has something called a DocumentBuilder and DocumentBuilderFactory that appear to be necessary to tell the framework what type of class to instantiate that implements the Document DOM interface. Those appear to have a lot of methods that deal with parsing of XML documents and I didn't really want to write or even subclass any existing Parsers in order to get the functionality of traversing and transforming a set of classes that implement the DOM interface.

Am I missing something here? Is it possible to plug in any (set of classes for) DOMImplementation and get them to work with the various DOM and XML tools out there?

Is there an easier way to allow parts of an application access to internal data structures but have the more generic tools or APIs, such as XSL transformers, access that same set of classes as a DOM with the generic DOM interface methods?

Can someone provide me with some guidance here? I'm in the process of finalizing some design on a system and need to know if this is possible or if I need to alter my design.

Thanks.