RE: JAXP and Java XML APIs (was RE: [xml-dev] difference bet. xer cesand crimson)

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

One of the things I haven't seen mentioned yet in this thread is the single feature I think most accounts for JDOM's ease-of-use: it has concrete classes and constructors instead of interfaces and factory methods. 

While there are good and valid reasons for using interfaces, especially in more complex problems, the fact remains that many, perhaps upwards of 90%, of working developers are deeply uncomfortable with this level of abstraction. This is masked somewhat by the fact that the 10% of developers who are comfortable with this extreme abstraction, design patterns, IDL, and the other arcana that comprise DOM are precisely the 10% of developers who participate in mailing lists, write books, and sit on working groups. But we are not representative of most programmers!

One data point: my DOM level 3 presentation is available in both IDL and Java, and has been given in various forms at several XML conferences. I don't want to leave out the C++, Python and Perl programmers so I always ask the audience which they'd rather see, the Java version or the IDL version. The response has ranged from unanimously choosing Java to unanimous minus one or two people. Concreteness rules.  
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| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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