[jdom-interest] deprecated methods and other suggestions

[Daniel Tofan]

  I have been using jdom b8 for a while and now I just got the b9 
version. I was unpleasantly surprised by a few changes. I had switched 
from DOM to jdom for its ease of use and convenience. I now see that 
this convenience is going away and I'm wondering why. Here are my concerns:

First, I believe that deprecating removeChildren() in Element is not a 
good idea. Removing all children from an element now requires 2 method 
calls and the intermediate List object, instead of just one method call.

Same goes for hasChildren(). It makes perfect sense to check whether an 
Element has children with this method; why the extra burden of returning 
a List and checking its size?

Also, there are some features that would be quite useful (and/or 
convenient) and that are not present in jdom. One would be a method 
getFirstChild() in Element, which would return the first child. Again, I 
see no reason why users should be forced to go through the List returned 
by getChildren() to find what they need. Convenience methods is one of 
Java's most important features.

Another one would be a method to retrieve a child of an Element with a 
given name, no matter what depth it's at. For example, an element called 
"mat" could be found in structures such as:
    <a>
        <mat/>
    </a>
or
    <a>
        <b>
            <c>
                <mat/>
            </c>
        </b>
    </a>
In order to get the <mat/> element from however deep it resides, I had 
to implement the method:
Element dig(Element from, String target) , which returns the first 
occurrence of a child called "target" of the element "from", no matter 
the depth. I am making heavy use of this method because I am not 
interested in any children above the <mat/> element. It would be helpful 
if such a method existed in jdom. I would provide the code if the method 
was accepted for inclusion.

Other methods that I find essential for my work and might benefit users 
if they were available in Element:
    getSiblings() - would return all the siblings of an element directly
    getSameNameSiblings() - as above, but only for siblings with the 
same name
    getChild(String regex) and getChildren(String regex) to retrieve all 
children that match a regular expression, not just a fixed name

I have appreciated the flexibility of jdom over other APIs, but I would 
like to see it provide more convenience for the user, which should 
definitely make it the API of choice for xml processing.

Cheers,
Daniel

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