[jdom-interest] Text class in the api

[Bradley S. Huffman]

Alex Rosen writes:

> I agree, this would be a good time to go down the Text node route and see
> what happens.
> 
> This info certainly puts a hole in my String vs. StringBuffer argument
> (http://www.servlets.com/archive/servlet/ReadMsg?msgId=8776&listName=jdom-in
> terest). I was assuming that characters() was called multiple times only if
> the character data was longer than the parser's internal buffer, but I guess
> that's wrong. Bummer.
> 
> > There are other ways to do this of course, but I think using
> > a Text class
> > has advantages.  We might consider implementing the Text
> > internal storage as
> > char[] instead of String or StringBuffer.  By doing this, we
> > could get the
> > fast(er) append functionality of StringBuffer but near the
> > efficiency of
> > String which would still be the most common use case.
> 
> When would char[] be faster than StringBuffer?

I agree using a Text class has great advantages, but only if JDOMFactory
is modified to include a method for creating the class.

Why would Text have to internally store things as either String, StringBuffer,
or char[]?  What about storing/retriving the content in/from a file, database,
or on/from the network?

IMHO, have a default Text class that uses String.  Then specialized classes
can extend the default Text class to handle the special cases.