[jdom-interest] suggested JDOM2 improvements

[BIHANIC Laurent]

Hi Rolf,

Le 17/01/12 14:42, Rolf Lear a écrit :
> In the 'simple' XPath case (no extra namespaces, no Variables) XPath is
> still a 1-liner, which is hard to beat. In a complicated case I see more
> complexity trying to 'massage' your Namespaces and Variables in to some new
> type structures (the varargs) than the existing concept of adding
> Namespaces and setting variables.
>
> Also, keeping backward compatibility is a strong consideration.
>
> In reality I think I would like to see code examples of what you think it
> 'should' look like to get a better idea, but at the moment i am not
> convinced that it's actually broken enough to require fixing.

Well, as 99% of our XML use namespaces, using JDOM XPath is not a 1-liner.
And as the XPath API throws non-runtime exceptions, pre-compiling XPath
expressions (as we do for regex) requires using a class initializer to map
JDOMException to runtime exceptions.
The only case where we can't compile XPath expressions is when we want to use
variables. Which defeats the whole purpose of compiling XPath! Or we have to
use thread-local compiled XPaths.

So, I think it would be great to split the XPath API in two parts.

One for constructing compiled XPath expressions, including the namespaces,
using either a constructor/factory method with varargs, e.g. compile(String
expr, Namespace... namespace), or a builder/DSL. The result being an immutable
thread-safe XPath object. This part would only throw runtime exceptions,
IllegalArgumentException seeming sufficient.

A second for evaluating compiled XPaths on documents, taking optional variable
bindings as argument and throwing regular exceptions, e.g. find(context,
Map<String,Object> bindings)

If we go this way, we should leave the existing XPath class unchanged and
deprecate it and create a new separate class.

Regards,

Laurent
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