Nokogiri has SAX capabilities as well (http://nokogiri.org/Nokogiri/XML/SAX/Document.html). Any reason not to use them, especially as Nokogiri also has native JRuby support?
I had just wanted to speed up my XML parser and stumbled upon a Nokogiri vs Ox benchmark (http://www.ohler.com/dev/xml_with_ruby/xml_with_ruby.html). So I tried Ox.
Here's my effort to benchmark Nokogiri vs Ox, DOM vs SAX parsing on an 80mb XML file with 38k nodes: https://gist.github.com/3977120
Ox DOM: 6 seconds (550mb) Ox SAX: 6 seconds (12mb) Nokogiri DOM: 13 seconds (900mb) Nokogiri SAX: 24 seconds (11.8mb)
Nokogiri has SAX capabilities as well (http://nokogiri.org/Nokogiri/XML/SAX/Document.html). Any reason not to use them, especially as Nokogiri also has native JRuby support?