XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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

I've now pulled the recursion out of the Canonicalizer. Outside of 
samples, (hmm, should probably add a non-recursive sample as well) 
there are now by my count three significant places that use recursion 
when walking a tree:

1. The Serializer, which I'm pretty sure I'm not going to fix because 
the changes to the API and consequent limited functionality would be 
too severe. The Canonicalizer's API is not nearly as rich so I was 
able to fix it there. Possibly I'll add a NonRecursiveSerializer to 
the samples package.

2. XInclude, whose code is so yucky and nasty I don't want to touch 
it, at least not yet.  I'll probably throw a lot of this away and 
rewrite the internals at some point in the future. When I do that, I 
may make it non-recursive, but not just yet.

3. The Element copy constructor, and by extension Element's copy 
method. This is the one I'm on the fence about. It's not that much 
harder to make it non-recursive. The problem is that if I do so, then 
descendant elements can lose their subclasses since the copies will 
be created with the Element constructor and copy() method rather than 
the Element subclass copy constructor and copy method. This could be 
fixed but only by adding an additional protected method to the 
Element API that creates an empty element of the right subclass which 
copy could then call. That's a fairly large wart in the API just to 
avoid an uncommon problem that can be solved by setting a larger 
stack size when invoking the Java virtual machine. What do people 
think?



--

  Elliotte Rusty Harold
  elharo AT metalab.unc.edu
  Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
  http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA