[jdom-interest] StAX support

[Rolf Lear]

Hi Elliotte

I'll reply to you, not Michael because you have expressed the stronger
sentiment....

Is your assessment a statement on the future of StAX too? You feature
quite significantly as a proponent of StAX so it is somewhat interesting to
see your comments.

Anyway, I think the 'no gain in supporting StAX' is a little 'harsh', my
impression is that it is more of a gray area than your 'absolute'
statement... there must be *some* benefit to StAX, JDOM support has been
requested for years.... even if only sporadically...

If I were to try to summarize my sentiment it would be:

   Good idea, bad execution, could be fixed.

In more detail, I would say that the 'fragment parsing' part of the StAX
philosophy is a big advantage. I have spent a lot of time looking at that
feature as it is the biggest 'value' that StAX offers, as far as I can
tell. I guess the cocnept can be adapted to SAX and DOM parsing though.

There is nothing philosophically 'wrong' with pull-parsing, it has as much
value as push-parsing (just not as much history), so I don't want to
discount it on principal...

JDOM is about making XML handling easy, philosophically JDOM should make
it easy to work with what you have, and, if that happens to be a StAX
source/sink, then it should be easy to feed that in to (out of) JDOM....

Further, support of StAX is entrenched in JAXP, and it seems like it is a
'void' to have no support for it in JDOM.

...is there really nothing good about it?

If nothing else, I want to have some sort of 'official' statement on StAX:
i.e. I want to be at the point where JDOM2 does one of the following:

1. fully supports StAX
2. supports StAX with documented limitations
3. provides a well documented rationale for *not* supporting StAX

Unfortunately (for me) I have already spent a fair amount of time getting
my head in to the StAX world, so I now have a bias, but I think that option
2 is reasonable... I don't particularly want to throw out everything I did,
but I can't (right now) see a way to make the support complete.

Rolf

On Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:02:32 -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold
<elharo at ibiblio.org> wrote:
> I agree with Michael. There's no gain in supporting StAX. I would
> invest time or resources into it.