[jdom-interest] Introduction. JDOM for Java5?

[Phil Weighill-Smith]

In my opinion a beta should be far more "locked down" than occurred with JDOM... APIs changing as radically as those in JDOM imply alpha rather than beta stage (IMHO, beta implies that development is essentially complete, with API and function available, but that full testing and debugging hasn't been performed, whereas alpha implies that some API and function is there but the software is still in development).
 
You're right about WebSphere... (not using it but having to be deployable to it).
 
As I said, JDOM is actually a pretty good library...
 
Phil :n.

	-----Original Message----- 
	From: Spencer Marks [mailto:smarks at digisolutions.com] 
	Sent: Thu 1/26/2006 21:34 
	To: jdom-interest at jdom.org 
	Cc: 
	Subject: Re: [jdom-interest] Introduction. JDOM for Java5?
	
	

	I've had and talked with people who have had similar problems with 
	older versions of JDOM embedded in app servers.
	
	I am willing to bet you are using IBM's WebSphere.
	
	In any case, I tend to blame the tool vendors not JDOM for this.
	
	JDOM Beta 7 was released on 07.07.2001 - almost five years ago. Tool 
	vendors need to do  a better job of keeping up to date or providing 
	patches for situations like this.
	
	As far as the API changing goes, if we where talking about a released 
	version (like version 1.0) I'd agree. It should be stable, but we are 
	talking about beta version here.
	Betas are not supposed to locked down. The very notion of beta means 
	the code is influx  and being refined. Sometimes those refinements 
	mean API changes. Developers and tool vendors should anticipate that 
	beta versions might not be backwards compatibility and take the 
	appropriate steps.
	
	But it is definitely frustrating.  It seems like at least some of the 
	big tool vendors just doesn't pay enough attention to important 
	details like this.  I think they should. Unfortunately, it is often 
	easier to use a different library than get the tool vendor to do the 
	right thing. And that's a shame, especially in cases like JDOM which 
	I find really useful (not to mention easy to use).
	
	
	Spencer
	
	
	On Jan 26, 2006, at 3:39 PM, Phil Weighill Smith wrote:
	
	>
	>
	> We've actually moved away from using JDOM for the reason that our
	> products have to work with various web and app servers. A number of
	> these servers actually use old (e.g. 0.7) versions of the library 
	> which
	> are not API compatible even against the version (0.9) that we were 
	> using
	> and would have issues simply because they expose the library to 
	> embedded
	> web applications.