[jdom-interest] Xerxes Parser and JDOM

[Laurent Bihanic]

Hi, Jason,

IMHO, this is a documentation issue. Whatever we decide must be described 
clearly in the JDOM installation documentation, either to state which JARs the 
user needs to include in the classpath to use JDOM or to provide guideline on 
how to bundle JDOM with an application or applet, i.e. describe how to update 
the manifest to remove Xerces if the application uses another parser or 
another verson of Xerces.

Both solutions are OK once properly documented.

To choose, I'd prefer solution a) as I usually try to control the class path 
of the application and thus tend to strip all Class-Path entries in manifests 
to avoid version conflicts.
A typical case is an application that uses Xerces 2.0 with JDOM and Xalan, 
JDOM and Xalan come bundled with different versions of Xerces 1.4 ! Stripping 
Class-Path entries from third-party software JARs and replacing them by a 
single one in the application main JAR file is a good way to prevent these 
version conflicts.

Laurent


Jason Hunter wrote:

> A couple weeks ago Tobias wrote in complaining that his applet was
> always trying to fetch xerces.jar from his server while he was using
> crimson.jar as his parser, and wondered why.  I pointed him at the
> MANIFEST.MF file.  Seems that was the culprit.
> 
> So now we have a decision to make.  Do we
> 
> a) Remove the Class-Path line from the MANIFEST.  Upside:  People who
> use Crimson won't see two 404 hits.  Downside:  People who use Xerces
> will have to explicitly include it in the applet tags.  Further
> downside:  The cool "java -jar jdom.jar" easter egg won't work anymore!
> 
> b) Keep the Class-Path line.  Upside:  Easy Xerces and cool -jar. 
> Downside:  Two wasted hits.
> 
> I suspect there may be a third choice, or more upsides/downsides to this
> issue, so I'm writing to the list to see if anyone else has a thought.
> 
> -jh-