[jdom-interest] Beta5 candidate

[Peter V. Gadjokov]

>Well, this could go in PartialList.

It could, it doesn't quite belong there since it stores any kind of List.
I'm not 100% sure but I think PartialList messes with the contract of the
List interface in ways that if you actually used this method to store a
PartialList, you won't get the exact same thing back when you read it, in
certain cases.  But as I said, I'm not religious about it, it's a workable
solution, I'll go with it unless you've had a better 2:15am insight in the
interim. 

>And this probably really should go in Namespace -- let the class take
>care of its own serialization.

Yeah, that's a better way. I should have thought of it but I already had the
utils class when I added that method. The Namespace thing can be taken care
of by standard means (readResolve/writeReplace/ObjectInputValidation
trickery) but I don't think that works on 1.1. Package protected statics in
Namespace are practically as good and more compatible. I think we have
consensus then. 

I would be against holding up a b5 release to sort out the get Child/Element
issues. I think the API is likely to be affected by the next rev of
namespace handling. No matter what design we go with, it will have to be
able to represent namespace declarations, distinguish between namespace name
[info set term] and  namespace decal. and perhaps even be able to do
in-scope tests. Such changes seem significant enough to likely affect our
views and the practical details of the traversal methods.

I'm putting with something else right now (a little JDOM-based utility to
make graphviz[http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/]
pretty-pictures of XML docs, I'll make it available if anyone else has a use
for it) but I'll make the serialization changes sometime tonight and email
them out. Thanks for the feedback. 

-pvg