[jdom-interest] & in namespace

[Victor Toni]

Mattias Jiderhamn wrote:
> 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.

I would suggest first a 1.0.1 bug-fix release to keep compatibility for 
older projects. Based on this release JDOM could be migrated to use 
generics for a 2.0 release. One could assume that until this task is 
complete many more migrations to "Tiger" would have happened.
Basically this is more of a management issue for which I would identify 
two options:
a) keep two branches: "classic" and "generic" and apply changes when 
appropriate to both
b) updates happen only in the "generic" tree, a tool such as Retroweaver 
(http://retroweaver.sourceforge.net/) could be used to make it available 
for older Java version.

I am really looking forward to have generics in JDOM and would even step 
forward for this task ;-)

Victor