XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Wolfgang Hoschek <whoschek AT lbl.gov>]

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> I'm thinking about this. It's possible XOM will add something like this. 
> However, if I do it would have to be more careful not to override the 
> features and properties that the Builder wants set a certain way. For 
> instance, I think your patch would allow the user to turn off loading of 
> the external DTD subset.

Just move the

        if (propertiesAndFeatures != null) { ...}

from the end (where it is now) to the beginning of setupParser(...)
That way XOM will override user specified features where XOM depends on 
them.

Wolfgang.

> But I am seriously considering adding a feature/property interface to 
> the Builder class that would allow setting and getting individual 
> features, while filtering out requests to reset features and properties 
> XOM depends on such as entity-resolution. This could allow me to remove 
> the XMLReader argument from the Builder class thus making the public 
> interface of the nu.xom package completely independent of SAX. This 
> would mean in the future I could use a different non-SAX parser/API such 
> as StAX or XNI if that seemed useful.
>
> More immediately, it would help XOM enforce the use of Xerces, which I'm 
> seriously considering. As the unit test suite grows, it's becoming 
> obvious to me that most SAX parsers are seriously broken; either a 
> little (Crimson, Xerces 2.5 and earlier) or a lot (Oracle, Piccolo). 
> Noticing things in the XOM unit tests has even led me to find bugs in 
> other non-SAX/non-Java parsers such as libxml. Xerces 2.6 (not yet 
> released, get it out of Gump or the XOM CVS tree) is the *only* parser 
> that is capable of passing the complete XOM test suite.

Minor note: On the other hand pluggable parsers might be useful for 
testing. If no other parsers were pluggable, one could not easily find 
out to what extent they work (or do not work), or if they become fixed 
at some point in the future. You wouldn't have found out that they  have 
problems if they weren't easily pluggable, right?

Wolfgang.