XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Kevin Herrboldt <kevin AT puppethead.com>]

On Thursday, Sep 19, 2002, at 23:26 US/Central, Bradley S. Huffman 
wrote:

> Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:
>
> > John Naylor suggested the following name change:
> >
> > i just gave xom a quick look and like much of what i see.  just one 
> > comment
> > for now, have you considered toXml() instead of getStringForm().
[...]
> Is there some reason people don't like toString() for this 
> functionality.

Having done quite a bit of XML stuff in my own code, I initially used 
toString() to return XML for an object. I quickly found, however, that 
this created a namespace collision since toString() is meant as a 
human-readable string. In particular, Swing classes like JList and 
JTree use toString() as default behavior when rendering objects. If you 
have a JList of XOM nodes (say) probably the last thing you want is the 
actual XML to be rendered.

toXML() is actually what I ended up going with for my own code, and  I 
think it is a clear and natural choice for XOM. It describes exactly 
what you're getting. I also think getStringForm() is a good example of 
a "passive" function name (think active vs. passive voice writing) and 
isn't very clear to someone who is new to XOM, whereas toXML() is.