[jdom-interest] why did you change Element.addContent?

[Jason Hunter]

Alex Rosen wrote:

> There was some talk of changing it back, because the benefit of the
> Parent notion was not worth  the cost in broken code. Jason, what did
> you decide on this?
> 
> Alex

Nothing yet.  This is in fact the thing I pondered during my morning 
shower.  :-)

The problem is Java 1.4 and earlier doesn't have covariant return types, 
meaning an overridden version of a method can't return something more 
specific than the parent version.  That changes in Java 1.5 where this 
problem goes away.  In Java 1.5 the Parent interface can return Parent 
while the Element implementation returns the more specific type of 
Element.  Thus one solution is to ship JDOM 1.0 including Parent as is 
and craft a Java 1.5 version with covariant return types and other 
niceties.  I'm interested in a 1.5 version anyway since generics provide 
some interesting features I'd like to fiddle with.

The other solution is to yank out Parent entirely, going back to the 
older model.  This gives us method chaining on older Java versions, 
although we would lose the ability to do getParent().getParent() style 
chaining that others wanted (since getParent() would return Object) -- 
unless we change the getParent() semantics which isn't good at this 
stage.  This change also requires things like DescendantIterator which 
takes a Parent to take Element or Document versions.  The biggest 
downside to this solution is we'll have to do a lot of code and API 
changes which would make me less comfortable doing a 1.0 release quickly.

-jh-