XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

At 10:00 AM +0200 9/26/02, Laurent Bihanic wrote:


> IMHO, relying on package-protected access is a bad idea. We have to 
> keep in mind the problems JDOM always had with inputters and 
> outputters: Almost every field and method has become public because 
> the default outputters (SAX or XML) needed to be derived to support 
> specific use cases.

This is one of JDOM's mistakes I learned from. You'll notice XOM 
doesn't have separate input and output packages. It's all part of the 
core. That's specifically to enable package access.

This lets me do lots of cool things. For instance, it would be 
possible to maintain a package protected isCDATA field between the 
builder so CDATA sections from the input could still be CDATA in the 
output with no user intervention. It would also be possible to rely 
on the parser for well-formedness checking and not use Verifier. I 
haven't implemented either of these ideas yet since they would not 
impact the public or protected APIs.

> We need to find a way to either ease subclassing of these or prevent 
> it by using "pluggable behaviour classes" like TextWriter.

Do you have something specific in mind?
--

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| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo AT metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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|          XML in a  Nutshell, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly, 2002)          |
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