Hey, that is pretty awesome. I had zero Java experience, but I felt inspired by your post, so I searched "java without ide" and got an XML parser up and running in approximately 20 minutes.

For the curious reader, here's how to do Java entirely from the command line:

1) install the JDK and add its "bin" directory to your PATH. For me this was "jdk1.7.0_02/bin"

2) copy and paste http://pastebin.com/R47bwDZx and save it into a new file called "test.xml"

3) copy and paste http://pastebin.com/Ut5dKBkn and save it into a new file called "ReadXMLFile.java"

- note, this is not my code. It's just a snippet I found from the 'net. Feel free to clean it up. =) My goal was "to get up and running as quickly as possible". Production code would be cleaner than this.

4) run these commands:

  javac ReadXMLFile.java
  java ReadXMLFile test.xml

And the XML file is parsed!

So why go through all this trouble, when you could just write it in Python?

Deployment comes to mind as one reason to go with this approach; fewer systems have Python installed than Java runtime.

So therefore when you deploy your app, you'd have to either 1) make customers install Python, or 2) (more likely) ship the contents of the "Python27" folder along with your Python app, and invoke your app via a shell script, or something. I'm not sure.