[jdom-interest] How about a general purpose Object reference?

[Alex Chaffee]

> Is there any compelling reasons not to do this? 

Cause it's dumb? :-)

Just kidding, it's a natural instinct, used in library APIs since the
dawn of time, but leads (as you said) to all sorts of messiness.

Since JDOM defines equals() lazily (that's not an insult, just a
description -- it uses ==) you can use a hashtable, and be assured you
won't get back the same object for different nodes that happen to have
the same contents.

  Map extra = new HashMap();
  extra.put( elementA, objectB );
  extra.put( elementC, objectD );

There's your association between JDOM nodes and arbitrary objects.

 - A

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