[jdom-interest] JDOM and XML Signature?

[David Wall]

Rats, I posted this to Philipp directly instead of the list...

> How about creating some kind of project group [*] to implement and test
> these features? I think there is no possibilty in getting them into the
> development tree before the 1.0 release. After that milestone there should
> be room for new goals. Some contributors could start based on the current
> jdom tree and then get their results merged into the main project when the
> final 1.0 release is out.

Absolutely.  There's no point in holding back the 1.0 release.  This might
even be a separate project, but one that works by using a JDOM tree instead
of a DOM.  This is the way the Apache code works (against a DOM) and doesn't
try to add methods to the DOM API itself.

I've just been so impressed by the clarity of JDOM code compared to DOM
code, and the XML DSig from Apache is fine, but it's equally ugly
considering what should be fairly typical needs, and that is, specifying a
set of elements and then signing those elements!  With JDOM, it seems like
you'd just create a List of elements to sign and pass it to a new sign
method (giving it a PrivateKey), or calling a "verify" methoid with a
PublicKey.  But then, life never seems as easy as you'd think on first
looks!

David