All of XStream's XML drivers normally use simply the PrettyPrintWriter to emit XML and do not use the explicit Writers of the implementation. Those can be used to build a DOM out of the written elements. Unfortunately the HSW interface does not define a method, how to access the written DOM tree(s). Therefore introduce a DomGenerator interface and use the JDomWriter's functionality and interface as template, since it has the most advanced functionality.

Note: Personally I was not aware of this use case as it is described in http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=25923 by Joe and I broke the Dom4JWriter in XStream 1.2.