[jdom-interest] Child-Parent patch - Ideas.

[Jason Hunter]

Rolf sent in this change a while back, and I just integrated it with the 
latest CVS code but haven't checked it in.  I'm curious what other 
people think of it as an approach.  Rolf's description below explains 
its justification.

I invite people to compare the CVS HEAD (get it from CVS or at 
http://jdom.org/head.zip) versus the source at http://jdom.org/rolf.zip. 
  Comments welcome.  Which way should we go?

-jh-

Rolf Lear wrote:

> I have had a look at the Child/Parent thing.
> 
> Personally, I don't think the Idea has been taken far enough, so I 
> played around with the concept, and "normalised" some of the redundancies.
> 
> Firstly, I converted the Child interface into an Abstract class that 
> deals with ALL Parent/child relationships for the Child role, including 
> detaching, cloning, set/getParent (and holds the parent instance field).
> 
> I also implemented getDocument at the Child Class level (all children 
> have the same mechanism for getting the Document).
> 
> Next, I added the method "getDocument" to the Parent Interface... and 
> parent can getDocument, including the Document class which has "return 
> this;" in the getDocument().
> 
> Finally, I changed the ContentList class substantially. elementData is 
> now called childData, and is of type Child[] instead of Object[]. The 
> ContentList owner is now of type Parent instead of Object. I have added 
> a method canContain to the Parent interface, and thus the actual Parent 
> object determines what content is allowed in the contentlist, so instead 
> of add(int,Text), add(int,Element), add(int,CDATA), 
> add(int,ProcessingInstruction), etc, there is just add(int, Child).
> 
> In doing all of the above, I have cut large amounts of 
> redundant/duplicated code, simplified the relationships, and thrown away 
> "special cases". The only downside I can see in terms of "functionality" 
> is that some of the exceptions are thrown with less specialised messages...
> 
> Please have a look, and comment on the concept. Note, that this is only 
> possible by converting Child to an abstract class instead of an interface.
> 
> Rolf
> 
> 
> <<jdom_child.zip>>
>