[jdom-interest] Extending JDOM classes

[Simon Harris]

As JDOM appears to provide no factory class, is there any way to have JDOM
us my own extensions when building from XML?

Specifically I'd like to extend Element and Attribute to add some type aware
methods such as Object getTextValue() or the like which would return
String/BigDecimal/Boolean/etc. depending on the type defined in the schema.

Additionally I'd like the methods to cache the value so as not to have to
re-parse the text each time it is accessed. Because of this last
requirement, it would not be practical (nor effecient IMHO) to have some
kind of facade over JDOM.

Regards,

Simon.