At 2:14 PM -0400 7/15/02, Mike Champion wrote:


> - There is one and only one JDOM. If you commit to it,
> you have the source code and and open process to work with,
> but no alternatives to easily switch to.

Please remember that you absolutely can switch parsers. JDOM supports 
just about any SAX2 parser on the planet. You can even use a DOM 
parser if you really want to. In practice JDOM code is *much* more 
portable across parsers than DOM implementations are. I have yet to 
be able to run a significant DOM program on two different DOM 
implementations (in Java) without debugging and rewriting some code, 
even in those parts that are allegedly standard.

> - JDOM's architecture expolits the fact that there it doesn't
> have to worry about multiple implementations. This is a strength if
> you like to use classes and constructors rather than
> interfaces and factories, but some prefer the design patterns
> that these facilitate.

Be that as it may, I'm coming to realize that an interface-based 
solution is fundamentally wrong for XML read-write APIs. DOM has some 
very deep flaws at its core precisely because it is based on 
interfaces rather than classes. For a long time, this was hidden from 
me by the sheer ugliness of DOM stemming from its IDL heritage. But 
DOM has deeper problems than that.

Come to the New York XML User's Group meeting September 17 if you 
want to hear me explain exactly what is wrong with DOM (and JDOM, and 
ElectricXML, and dom4j) and how it can be fixed. I also plan to 
release what I suspect will be the first genuinely correct tree-based 
API for XML processing in Java.

> - JDOM is easier than DOM for simple things, but even its
> advocates (see below) acknowledge that hard things can be
> VERY hard.

That sounds like something I said, and I still think it, but I don't 
know that I'd call myself an advocate of JDOM these days.
-- 

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@[...].edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+

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