RE: [xml-dev] Underwhelmed (WAS: [xml-dev] XOM micro tutorial)

["Dare Obasanjo" <dareo@microsoft.com>]

I am doubly underwhelmed. All I saw upon looking at the XOM docs after all the promise of something revolutionary was something slightly less advanced than the DOM implementation in the .NET Framework. The only thing I saw in the XOM's favor is that one doesn't need to use the parent document to create elements or go through node importation to append nodes from one tree to another. 
 
The minus points after taking a cursory glance at it and comparing against the DOM I am most familar with (the one in the .NET Framework)
 - No XPath support [this makes makes it a non-starter in my book]
 - Doesn't preserve lexical fidelity 
 - Can't insert XML strings directly into the tree 
 
PS: I had really expected to see a new paradigm in manipulating XML presented by ERH besides the entire-document-in-memory-with-random-access and streaming-forward-only-access models. All I saw was a slightly tweaked W3C DOM. Perhaps people like me were the wrong audience and the announcement was meant for Java folks? 

	-----Original Message----- 
	From: Miles Sabin [mailto:miles@milessabin.com] 
	Sent: Fri 9/20/2002 12:46 PM 
	To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org 
	Cc: 
	Subject: [xml-dev] Underwhelmed (WAS: [xml-dev] XOM micro tutorial)
	
	

	Michael Fitzgerald wrote,
	> If you are interested and want an on-ramp, I've written a very quick
	> micro tutorial. It assumes that you are comfortable with Java. Here
	> ya go:
	<snip/>
	
	> public class Date {
	>
	<snip/>
	
	I'm afraid I don't find this example particularly compelling, because it
	invites a comparison with,
	
	  public class Date
	  {
	    public static void main(String[] args)
	    {
	      System.out.print(
	        "<?xml version="1.0"?>\n"+
	        " <date type="ISO">\n"+
	        " <year>2002</year>\n"+
	        " <month>09</month>\n"+
	        " <day>20</day>\n"+
	        "</date>\n"
	      );
	    }
	  }
	
	and loses,  big time.
	
	Any tree-like API lives or dies by its ease of use for traversal and
	manipulation rather than simple construction and serialization. And
	there I just don't see XOM as sufficiently different from the DOM or
	JDOM or DOM4J to get particularly excited about. Yeah, it's a bit
	cleaner, a bit more idiomatic for Java ... but is that enough?
	
	Cheers,
	
	
	Miles
	
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