In this case, you want to have the expression compiled before the evaluations, so that each call to evaluate does not compile the same expression. The simple syntax would be:

XPath xPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath(); //Make new XPath
XPathExpression exp = xPath.compile("/documentation/tags/tag[@name='Java']//example");
DocumentBuilder builder = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
Document doc = builder.parse(new File("path/to/xml.xml")); //Specify XML file path

NodeList javaExampleNodes = (NodeList) exp.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODESET); //Evaluate the XPath from the already-compiled expression

NodeList javaExampleNodes2 = (NodeList) exp.evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODESET); //Do it again

Overall, two calls to XPathExpression.evaluate() will be much more efficient than two calls to XPath.evaluate().