Re: [xml-dev] Have JDOM / XOM / etc. failed? If so, why?

["Andrew S. Townley" <andrew.townley@bearingpoint.com>]

On Sat, 2006-04-01 at 03:44, Oleg A. Paraschenko wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Thu, 30 Mar 2006 10:36:12 -0800
> "Michael Champion" <michael.champion@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> ...
> >  
> > But if this is true, why have cleaner, programming language-friendly
> > alternatives failed to displace the dear old DOM as the dominant XML
> > programming model after all these years?
> 
> Being a mediocre Java coder, I wonder if the alternatives do really
> provide any benefits, comparing to the standard DOM with XPath support.
> I've looked at the home pages of JDOM, dom4j, XOM, and only XOM has
> description how it is different from other competitors. I don't believe
> the words "easy to use, intuitive, optimised, flexible, unique, open
> source": these words are everywhere.

Hi Oleg,

>From my own personal work in Java, I prefer JDOM over using plain DOM. 
I haven't used dom4j or XOM, but for what I was doing recently, SAX
filters for work on the entire document plus JDOM for retrieving
specific data either explicitly based on structure (I needed basically
all of the document, but not in the same case where I was using SAX) or
retrieval of a handful of values using XPath and namespaces.

As people have mentioned, it's designed to fit more easily into the
"natural" use of Java.  For that, I think it worked fine with minimal
lines of code for what I was doing.

The only compliant I had (and I haven't managed to write this up to the
list because I fixed it and then got side-tracked) was to do with the
design of the XMLOutputter for inheritance (or the lack of).  It's
probably fixed now, but I had to inject my own class into the JDOM
package structure to fix something with attribute normalization for C14N
as well as dealing with some whitespace/element expansion issues and
insistence on outputting the doctype with the trailing newline (always).

Other than this problem (which I was able to work around), I didn't
think it was awkward enough to go hunting for another API.  I had
previously looked at dom4j briefly, but decided (for reasons I don't
remember) to give JDOM a go.

All-in-all, a very scientific selection process, I assure you... ;)

ast
--
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