SV: [jdom-interest] jdom and dom4j

[Philip Nelson]

> > Just an observation. I've used JDOM *professionally* over the 
> > last two years
> > with great success. In fact, I even think the usage has saved 
> > me some time beacuse 
> >    a) it was easy to learn
> 
> And does this realy mather after two years of usage?

This is very true.  It only really matters when you are doing a very tactical
solution or when you regularly bring in new people.

> This is what I see as the main point, a API should already contain general
> powerful utilities. The easily could can be adopted with domain specific
> knowledge. JDOM don't provide these 'utilities' AND and don't provide
> interfaces for easy adoption of default behaivor. So infact the 1% that is
> not solved by the small amount of code takes 80% of the time to implement
> because of the API.

An api that attempts to solve anybody in particular's 1%, will be less useful
in general.  Fully understanding this point is one of the great unsung black
arts of our field. On one end you have these great monolithic application
framesworks like PeopleSoft or SAP that try to solve everything. 
Implementations can take as long as starting from scratch.  One the other end
you have the base languages where you do start from scratch.  Between languages
and applications are libraries and frameworks, which are sometimes difficult to
differentiate.  JDOM may have been originally envisioned as an application
framework based on XML but very quickly became a library for working with XML
documents.  Frameworks like Zeus have been built on top of JDOM and it is in
frameworks that you should expect more powerful utilities.  Your selection of a
framework should find an impedence match with your applications.  With JDOM, I
think we have all come to the consensus that it is enough to just deal really
well with XML.  As we commented in an earlier thread, I think direct use of
api's like JDOM, DOM, dom4j will and should fall away in favor of more specific
frameworks like data binding layers that are in turn built on JDOM.

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