[jdom-interest] jdom and dom4j

[Jason Hunter]

The comparison doesn't address the most interesting concerns people
have.  One important thing not mentioned is how complicated the APIs
are.  JDOM's founding goal has been simplicity with an easy learning
curve with power tools available when necessary.  In that way it's like
Java itself.  

The fact JDOM is going through the JCP process as an official JSR isn't
mentioned either.

Looking just at the facts on the page, JDOM now has integrated XPath (as
of the latest CVS code) and we've had integrated JAXP/TRaX support for
quite a long time.  Both of those bullet items should be updated.  

The "Massive documents" and "event-based processing" items probably
refer to dom4j's feature to only build parts of the tree.  Laurent wrote
similar code for JDOM.  Look at the "spanner" code in jdom-contrib.  If
it becomes popular and people like the API, we'll make it core.

Hmm, dom4j says "built on Java interfaces".  What that probably should
say is it's built on its own interfaces.  Both dom4j and JDOM support
standard interfaces like java.util.List, Cloneable, and so on.

As for the Schema item, you can use Schema in JDOM if the parser
supports schema.  The bullet item may mean something else though.  Hard
to tell.

Hmm, other interesting features that aren't mentioned are whether the
API can *output* a document.  DOM L2 doesn't even support that in a
standard manner.  I suspect there's a lot of features that could be
added to a list like this.  Perhaps we should write a comparison chart
on the JDOM site.

-jh-

Sam wrote:
> 
> Hi.
> 
> I was looking at dom4J recently and trying to figure out how it compares
> with dom4J ? Is this comparison table on the dom4j website accurate ?
> http://www.dom4j.org/compare.html
> 
> Thanks
> .s/
> 
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