[jdom-interest] & in namespace

[Mattias Jiderhamn]

At 2006-05-03 19:32, MEF wrote:
>On 03/05/06, Jason Hunter <jhunter at xquery.com> wrote:
>>BTW, JDOM's not dead.  I'm still engaged, just need to get off my duff
>>and do a 1.0.1 with the few small bugs we fixed since 1.0.  There hasn't
>>been much interest expressed in a 1.1 release.  JDOM already does
>>everything *I* care about.  Are there things people want in a 1.1 or
>>2.0, or should we stay in happy maintenance mode.
>
>The one big thing I'd like would be if the various things that return
>Collections would return parameterised values instead of the base
>classes that they return right now. For example, Element.getChildren()
>is actually even documented to return a List of Elements, but the
>return type is plain old List. It would be nice if that were
>List<Element> instead, so you wouldn't need to cast all the time.

What you're really asking for is a Java 5/generics version of JDOM.
Well, if "everybody" agrees to leave the Java 1.2 compatible 1.0 
version in happy maintenance mode, why not aim for generics?
I sure would like that, and probably we need to get there some day. 
Possibly I could contribute some time too.

I could mention that this shift is being discussed in other Open 
Source projects too - such as the Jakarta Commons Collection project. 
In that case, there is still no "official" generics version, but 
there are two alternative implementations on SourceForge, featuring 
generics. The difference with JDOM is that Collections is still being 
more or less actively developed.