[jdom-interest] Why not interfaces?

[Jason Hunter]

> I've just been looking over the JDOM docs and APIs and I noticed that
> all the major classes were concrete classes, not interfaces with
> supporting abstract implementations.

I just posted recently about the things that the interface/factory makes
you do, as evidenced by what DOM does.  Think about building a "thread
safe" implementation -- then how do you guarantee the doc remains thread
safe?  You have to do things like use the doc as the factory and import
nodes.  Way more pain than it's worth.  You also lose the ability to
mandate how equals() works, and things like that.

-jh-

P.S.  So we meet again Paul.  :-)