Is manual XML parsing ever required instead of JAX-WS or SAAJ?

I抦 just starting out with web services, so please excuse my silly question:

Most of the books and tutorials on web services that I抳e read explain XML parsing at great length (JAXB, SAX, StAX and DOM).

Although web services do make extensive use of XML in SOAP and WSDL, I can抰 see why I would need to parse/write it directly. I figured one would generally use either the high level JAX-WS (JAX-RPC) API or for lower level programming the SAAJ API for SOAP. And code generation tools for WSDL.

Do the tutorials add this in for background information or am I missing something important?

Many thanks

[628 byte] By [domfromlondona] at [2007-11-26 22:27:17]