It markets itself as providing a sensible, easy-to-understand API for reading, writing, modifying, and querying documents. It is available for ruby as well as java through Jruby.
It provides fast and standards-compliant parser by relying on native parsers like libxml2 (CRuby) and xerces (JRuby).
It is one of the most downloaded Ruby gems, having been downloaded over 700 million times from the rubygems.org repository.[8]