[jdom-interest] Fast Factory

[Alex Rosen]

> 6. I tried using a "Fast Factory" approach, and I found that in
reality
> (without making radical structural changes to the JDOM API), that
the
> performance improvements were marginal.

As I mentioned recently, you'd think that this would be very dependent
on the document you're parsing. One with large blocks of text content
would be hurt more by the double-checking of character values.

A while ago I said that I would consider it to be a significant
performance hit if parsing took 10% longer in common cases, or 20%
longer in less common cases, or something like that. That would be
enough to make people consider using a different API, at least in some
cases, in which case all of JDOM's benefits are lost in those cases. DOM
does less verification that JDOM, and dom4j does none, IIRC, so if
you're worried about receiving a malformed document from somebody then
we're being counterproductive.

Alex