[jdom-interest] Impact of removing Element.addContent(CDATA) in Beta 9

[Graham Crawford]

With the removal of Element.addContent(CDATA) and the addition
of Element.addContent(Text) in JDOM Beta 9 a number of interesting
incompatibilities have arisen.

1. Code compiled against an earlier version (lets say Beta 8)
    will not run with a Beta 9 jar.  This occurs when deploying
    such code into JBoss 3.2.2.

2. Code compiled against the latest version (Beta 9) will not
    run with an earlier version of JDOM (e.g. Beta 7.)
    This occurs when deploying such code into JRun 4.

The class loading algorithm used by both JBoss and JRun
(and quite possibly many others) mean that the version
of JDOM they supply is used in preference to any supplied
by an application.

The result is that the same application cannot work in both
of these environments.

While you can update the JDOM supplied by the application servers
you run the risk of both breaking their code as well as other
applications running within them.

As application server vendors (and perhaps application vendors)
are very slow to upgrade their dependant libraries it is unwise
to make API changes such as this as it can have far reaching
implications ...

---
Graham

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