XOM API for Processing XML with Java

["Bradley S. Huffman" <hip AT a.cs.okstate.edu>]

Elliotte Rusty Harold writes:
> At 6:29 AM -0700 10/22/02, Michael Fitzgerald wrote:
> >Likewise, I think
> >
> >nu.xom.Node getNextSibling()
> >nu.xom.Node getPreviousSibling()
> 
> 
> You know, these methods have bothered me for a while, and I think 
> I've finally put my finger on the problem, and maybe come up with a 
> solution. The problem is that they don't really fit well into XOM's 
> mostly indexed style of access.

Works great with linked nodes like Xerces, not so good in List implementations
like JDOM, dom4j, and XOM.
 
> Perhaps instead, both of these methods should be replaced with the 
> following:
> 
> public int position()
> 
> (Alternate names: indexOf(), index())

Or moved to ParentNode as getNextSibling(Node)/getPreviousSibling(Node)
since in this model Nodes don't have siblings unless they have a parent.
For performance the parent could keep last index fetched.

> Open questions (assuming this is a good idea at all):
> 
> 1. What should position() return if the parent is null? 0? -1? throw 
> an exception?

Or put position(Node) in ParentNode and throw a exception if parent the Node
not equal to ParentNode, otherwise it is guaranteed to return a valid index.

Brad