[jdom-interest] jdom and dom4j

[Jason Hunter]

bob mcwhirter wrote:
> 
> > The fact JDOM is going through the JCP process as an official JSR isn't
> > mentioned either.
> 
> I thought we'd gone over this a few times, and decided that the JSR status
> was basically meaningless?
> 
> Am I wrong, or is the fact JDOM is a JSR only means that JDOM will be using
> the JCP for its own development, but implies nothing regarding the "Java
> Standard".  If/when JSR 102 reaches maturity, will org.jdom.* become
> a part of the JDK or JAXPacks?  (or, renamed to javax.xml.tree.*, or
> whatnot?)

I expect there will be some part of JDOM under the javax.* namespace.

> > 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.
> 
> I think, in both cases, he's comparing out-of-the-box with out-of-the-box,
> ignoring contrib'd projects.  I think.  I could certainly be wrong.

The TRaX support has been OOTB a long time, and XPath is in there in the
latest code.

> > 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.
> 
> Interface-based as opposed to concrete-class based, is the point he's
> trying to make, I think.

Solution: s/Java//

> > 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.
> 
> There's been quite a few charts/tables comparing JDOM to DOM in many
> regards.  But typically, the folks constructing the charts/tables
> ignore dom4j completely.  dom4j hasn't gotten nearly the press
> attention as JDOM.

That's probably because JDOM came first.  dom4j was a fork of JDOM. 
Historically, forks tend not to prosper as well as the original
projects.

-jh-