XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo AT metalab.unc.edu>]

Welcome to the XOM-interest mailing list! Last night at the New York 
XML SIG meeting, I unveiled XOM, a new XML Object Model for Java 
published under the LGPL. Like DOM, JDOM, dom4j, and ElectricXML, XOM 
is a read/write API that represents XML documents as trees of nodes. 
Where XOM diverges from these models is that it strives for absolute 
correctness and maximum simplicity. XOM is based on more than two 
years' experience with JDOM development, as well as the last year's 
effort writing Processing XML with Java. While documenting the 
various APIs I found lots of things to like and not like about all 
the APIs, and XOM is my effort to synthesize the best features of the 
existing APIs while eliminating the worst. It's closest in spirit to 
JDOM. I had originally intended to fork JDOM, but it rapidly became 
apparent that very little actual JDOM code would be left when I was 
done and that starting from scratch would give me a flexibility I 
wouldn't have by using the existing JDOM code base. There is one 
non-public class hidden deep in the bowels of the API that uses some 
JDOM code (taken from, not coincidentally, the single JDOM class I 
was most personally responsible for) but otherwise, XOM was written 
starting with a blank screen.

I also attempted to write XOM according to a more modern 
understanding of Java in particular and API design in general than I 
had two years ago when JDOM was started. I've spent a lot of time 
over the last year thinking about the ideas of (and in some cases 
arguing with) Bruce Eckel, Joshua Bloch, Bertrand Meyer, Ken Arnold, 
Erich Gamma, Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and other design savants, 
sometimes in person, sometimes in e-mail, sometimes just in my own 
head. It may not be obvious at first glance, but these gurus 
collectively had a huge effect on the overall design of the API. For 
instance, Joshua Bloch's Effective Java gave me the courage to ignore 
the Cloneable interface and give my classes copy constructors 
instead. Bloch and Bruce Eckel together convinced me that many of the 
exceptions in XOM deserved to be runtime exceptions, not checked 
exceptions, a decision that makes a lot of code much cleaner.
--

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo AT metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian2/              |
|  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0596002920/cafeaulaitA/  |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|  Read Cafe au Lait for Java News:  http://www.cafeaulait.org/      |
|  Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/    |
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