[jdom-interest] Ampersand question

[Alex Chaffee]

> Therefore I want to take all the code in 
> XMLOutputter that's dedicated to converting JDOM objects to strings 
> and put it in XMLSerializer. This means that anybody who only wants 
> strings (e.g. for debugging) won't have to worry about encoding 
> issues. And we can make XMLSerializer guaranteed correct.
> 
> XMLOutputter will take care of moving the strings onto an output 
> stream or writer as necessary. It will delegate all the detailed 
> formatting of objects as strings to XMLSerializer.
...
> You know, I was trying to think of a better name than XMLSerializer 
> for the class since it really has nothing to do with object 
> serialization. Maybe I should call it XMLFormat, and change the 
> serialize() methods to format() methods.


That sounds very good (really!) except for one thing:

For performance reasons, you will want to be able to format() directly
onto a stream or writer, rather than suffering the waste of
intermediate Strings and/or StringBuffers.

Given that, I'm afraid that the cleanest solution is to merge the two
into one like I suggested before.  If you really want to separate ugly
encoding and IO logic from nice clean formatting logic, then it might
be possible to do some behind-the-scenes factoring, say making a
package-accessible XMLFormat class that provides implementation
methods for the formatting interfaces, but writes to a stream by
default anyway.  No promises though :-)


> In essence, I'm paralleling 
> the DecimalFormat/OutputStream distinction that Java uses for writing 
> numbers into text files and the console.

The *Format classes are also rife with string droppings. :-( Though at
least they append to a StringBuffer at heart, rather than returning a
String, which mitigates it somewhat.


If only the whole universe were pure and Unicode...

 - Alex

-- 
Alex Chaffee                       mailto:alex at jguru.com
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