[jdom-interest] Lost exceptions in JDOM beta 5

[Jason Hunter]

> I am very desoriented by the simplified exception handling in JDOM
> beta 5, comapred to the beta 4 release.  Many methods that use to
> raise NoSuch*Exceptions now return "null".  This seems very awkward to
> me!

You missed the long debate on if it was better to throw exceptions or
return null for children that did not exist.  Null won by popular
opinion.  I admit I'm not 100% thrilled with it.

> More importantly, this enables JDOM to generate non-well-formed
> documents!  Quite surprising, isn't it?

The null vs exception issue doesn't have anything to do with this.

> Could somebody explain me the reasons of this new (non-)exception
> handling approach in JDOM?  Is there any plan to go back to a more
> systematic exception-based scheme?

The archives are loaded with info.  (Sorry we don't have a better
archive search engine.)

-jh-