[jdom-interest] getChildTextNormalize()

[Kyle F. Downey]

>
>     try {
>         blahText = getChild("blah").getTextNormalize();
>     } catch (NullPointerException npe) {
>         blahText = "";
>     }
>

I prefer this, with a slight modification.

I designed an API that has similar structure (a hierarchical registry
instead of XML nodes, but otherwise similar: tree of nodes & attributes).
Generally, I prefer creating a meaningful runtime exception for this sort
of thing, which is what Akita does. This has two advantages:

1) there's no need to constantly check for a null return, so there's no
need for those extended convenience methods
2) if the child being missing is an error, then this error gets
propagated up the call chain transparently. The same can apply for
attributes, by the way. So why not a NoSuchElementException and
NoSuchAttributeException?

Of course, if your assumption is that a child being missing is normal,
then those arguments do not make sense. But IMHO, if a client object
really doubts that a child will be there, it should have a way to check
first, rather than bulling ahead and requesting it & getting a bad value:

if (node.hasChild(ns, "foo")) {
   bar = node.getChild(ns, "foo").getText();
}

At least to me, this makes more sense than using an invalid and
unusable return value to signal that it's not there. NullPointerExceptions
are a generally useless way of informing a programmer that he or she
goofed and should have performed some kind of check beforehand--they're
so common that the root cause is easily obscured. At least a semantic
error tells you exactly what you did wrong.

--kd