XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

At 1:42 AM +0100 2/4/03, Hugues Cassé wrote:
>         Hello,
> I'm currently developping a version of XOM for the Python languages.
> This work drives me to some design questions. These questions are
> not criticisms but interrogations of a XOM beginner. Yet, I must
> great Elliotte Rusty Harold for the XOM API design that melt
> simplicity, performance (I think) and power.
>   Thank you in advance for the answers.
>
> (1) Is there a technical or phylosophic reason not to use of class
> iterator in XOM?

Yes. XOM strives for simplicity and language conformance. Iterators
are neither simple nor familiar to most Java programmers. They cannot
do anything a simple indexed loop can't do, so I go with the simpler
solution. Iterators might be appropriate in a language where
iterators were a first-class language construct.  Is Python such a
language? I don't know. But Java is not.

> (2) I have noted the following problems with the current management
> of default namespaces with the current implementation of XOM (as far
> as I understand well the source :))
>   If the read XML file is something like
>         <pref1:tag1 xmlns="uri2" xmlns:pref1="uri1">
>                 <tag2/>
>                 ...
>                 <tag2/>
>         </pref1:tag1>
>   When it will be stored, it will become:
>         <pref:tag1 xmlns:pref1="uri1">
>                 <tag2 xmlns="uri2"/>
>                 ...
>                 <tag2 xmlns="uri2"/>
>         </pref1:tag1>
>   The result may waste a lot of storage and it diverges much from
> the original file, eventually making the user unhappy when it read
> it back. Although it is a very special case, I'm very sensitive to
> the human readibility of XML files.


That may be a bug. Do you have a simple test case?
--

+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo AT metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
|           Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)          |
|              http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava             |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA  |
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