We present the Tom language that extends Java with the purpose of providing high level constructs inspired by the rewriting community. Tom bridges thus the gap between a general purpose language and high level specifications based on rewriting. This approach was motivated by the promotion of rule based techniques and their integration in large scale applications. Powerful matching capabilities along with a rich strategy language are among Tom's strong features that make it easy to use and competitive with respect to other rule based languages. Tom is thus a natural choice for querying and transforming structured data and in particular XML documents. We present here its main XML oriented features and illustrate its use on several examples.