[jdom-interest] Last call: getChild/getChildren versus getChildElement/getChildElements

[Vadim.Strizhevsky at morganstanley.com]

Even though I don't particularly like Child/Parent business in general, I
thought the name change of getChild would be a disaster. I was seriously
considering never upgrading beyond B9 or having to have to hack it to
avoid change the huge amount of code that uses it already.

Jason, if I ever meet you in person I'll buy you a beer if this change is
going to get reverted. ;)

Thank you!
-Vadim

PS. And you're right you'd definately get yelled at.


On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Jason Hunter wrote:

> I'm a little worried I'm going to get yelled at when I release beta10
> deprecating getChild() and getChildren().
>
> If you haven't been paying attention to CVS, we added a Parent/Child
> pair of interfaces and as part of that changed getChild(String) to
> getChildElement(String) which we thought was more descriptive and less
> likely to be confusing considering a Child interface applies to types
> Element, Text, EntityRef, Comment, PI, and so on.  Also getChildren()
> and getChildren(String) became getChildElements() and
> getChildElements(String) for the same reason.
>
> Such a late deprecation is likely to peeve some people who wrote a lot
> of JDOM code.  Heck, it peeves me.  I'm thinking now we should just keep
> getChild() and getChildren() and document them for what they are and
> leave it at that.  JDOM's been around for *4 years* now and even though
> we haven't called it 1.0 and have reserved the right to change the API,
> changing a core method at this late date seems wrong.
>
> Might the names be confusing?  Perhaps.  But people are already used to
> getChild/getChildren.
>
> And here's more ammo.  What does $foo/child::* return in XPath/XQuery?
> All the child elements!  So getChildren() makes perfect sense in that
> view.  And $foo/child::bar returns all child elements named "bar" which
> would correspond to getChildren("bar").  It's not
> $foo/child-elements::*.  I think XPath got the "child" idea better than
> DOM did.
>
> I do wonder if we should change the Child interface name to Content.
> getContent() returns content, but everything right now is of type Child.
>    As a bonus, if we changed Child -> Content nothing would break since
> Child is new.  After all, what should getContent(int) return?  Not a
> Child, it should be a Content.
>
> Do we need to change Parent's name then?  I'm thinking not since
> getParent() should return a Parent.  Yes, we'll have a Parent/Content
> pairing which doesn't roll off the tongue, but hey, at least everyone
> won't have to change all their getChild() and getChildren() calls, we'll
> have getContent() return Content, and I won't get yelled at.
>
> So here's my proposal:
> * Change Child to Content
> * Remove getChildElement and getChildElements
> * Undeprecate getChild and getChildren
>
> -jh-
>
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