XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

I've posted XOM 1.0d3 in the usual location at 
http://www.cafeconleche.org/XOM/

The major change in this release is the refactoring of the Node 
classes along the lines suggested by John Cowan and discussed here 
over the last few days. TreeNode is gone. Its navigation methods have 
moved into Node. Its insertion and deletion methods are now part of a 
new ParentNode subclass. Element and Document are now subclasses of 
ParentNode. Attribute is a subclass of Node.

The other four node types (Comment, Text, ProcessingInstruction, 
DocType) are now subclasses of LeafNode which is a subclass of Node. 
I made LeafNode public, not so much because it needs to be as because 
making it package-private seemed to be confusing people. We had 
talked about eliminating this class, but it still felt useful to me 
for code reuse, and there's now a very nice dichotomy between leaf 
nodes and parent nodes.

Overall, this refactoring resulted in removing 40 pointless methods 
from the four leaf nodes classes (ten from each class) at the cost of 
adding six pointless methods to the Attribute class, a net savings of 
34 methods. That's pretty good. :-) It is no longer possible to even 
try to insert or append or remove a child from a leaf node. The 
methods just aren't there.

On the question of what Attribute.getNextSibling and Attribute. 
getPreviousSibling should return, I went with null. In the current, 
ArrayList-based implementation, getNextSibling and getPreviousSibling 
are probably fairly inefficient navigators. I think most code that's 
walking the tree should be using indexed access if possible. That 
said, I'm wishy-washy on this so if a consensus develops to go the 
other way, I'll flip-flop. :-)

The other, less major change in the API in this release is renaming 
the add() method to addAttribute() as had been previously discussed 
here.

I also spent a lot of time in this release cleaning up the JavaDoc. 
It's much improved, but still needs some work.

The next big project is probably the tutorial. This is very important 
as the notes from Tuesday are rapidly going out of sync with the 
current version. :-)
--

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| 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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