[jdom-interest] JDOM and Report Writing

[Jeff Martin]

I'm new to XML and JDOM, but all I can say is thank god this stuff 
exists. I was drowning in Sun's APIs and documentation, but with JDOM I 
was able to write code to save an Object Graph Description from any set 
of objects to XML in just a few hours. The code is here: 
http://reportmill.com/examples/RMSaveXML.java (if anyone has any hints 
about handling circular references, let me know, I'm about to embark on 
an id based referencing scheme).

My product, ReportMill, generates reports directly from Java objects, 
but it needs an object graph description to do template design. The 
next release is going to use XML for this (instead of a dataset file 
with serialized Java objects, for the current version). I thought this 
was going to be awesome, running reports from any XML datasource, but 
now I'm starting to think things will only work for XML files that 
follow specific supported conventions that I define (things like 
providing data types, object references, etc.). I'm sure many on this 
list know more than me - if you want to influence a nice product, 
please send advice if I'm missing the bigger picture!

jeff martin
214.513.1636
http://reportmill.com