[jdom-interest] XMLFilter/SAXHandler question...

[Brett McLaughlin]

> Would it make sense to go through the effort of creating such a
> "SmartBuilder" or is there some other way?

The short answer is it would be worth the effort. If you go look at some of
the very early articles on JDOM, like in "Java and XML" first edition and
javaworld.com, you will find mention of a "deferred builder" over and over.
It was always something we wanted in JDOM, and never had the time to code
up. The idea is that a deferred builder would build up information about a
document in terms of placeholders; so you could easily query the number of
children and things like that, but it would only fill out those placeholders
with actual data when neccessary.

This is actually quite close to what the Xerces Deferred DOM does, and would
probably bear some study in thinking about this. The most difficult thing is
that the builder is not "done" when the "build()" method exits in this
situation; it must remain tied to the document to know when new nodes must
be filled out.

Anyways, we'd love to see something like this, and while I couldn't
personally contribute code right now, I'd be happy to look things over and
comment, and help design.

Go for it...

---
Brett McLaughlin
Enhydra Strategist:   http://www.enhydra.org
Lutris Technologies: http://www.lutris.com
O'Reilly Author:       http://www.newInstance.com