[jdom-interest] Re: carrying user data around with an Element

[James Strachan]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Boag/CAM/Lotus" <Scott_Boag at lotus.com>
> From my viewpont, I still just don't get it.  JDOM is an implementation,

No. JDOM is a Java friendly interface (and implementation) to XML and a
complete replacement for DOM. JDOM is not an implementation of DOM, nor
should it ever be IMHO.

> DOM is a standard, generalized set of interfaces.

DOM is a big cross language API. In general cross language APIs suck IMHO.
They cannot take advantage of the language platform, naming conventions or
any infrastructure available. e.g DOM doesn't use Java collections,
hashCode(), equals() etc.

<aside>
To me one of the biggest gains of EJB over CORBA is the fact that one
language platform is used, rather than IDL and cross-language APIs which
make your code ugly.
</aside>

JDOM is an attempt to define a Java-only API to XML which takes advantage of
the Java platform to be smaller, more efficient and easier to use on the
Java platform.

> I still think that JDOM
> should implement the DOM core interfaces.

Absolutely not IMHO. If you don't like JDOM then just use DOM instead.
JDOM and DOM can be adapted to work together, though for efficiency reasons
I'd always pick one or the other.

> It doesn't mean that is doesn't
> still have it's JDOM interfaces.  It just means that it is compatible with
> APIs and applications that use the DOM for polymorphic access to tree
> structures.  I don't think they should be competative at all.

I do ;-)

J.

James Strachan
=============
email: james at metastuff.com
web: http://www.metastuff.com




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