XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[John Cowan <jcowan AT reutershealth.com>]

Elliotte Harold scripsit:

> The public API for nu.xom.Canonicalizer is getting increasingly unwieldy 
> as I add more and more options. It's time for a serious rethink. I don't 
> think this will affect the public API from 1.0 in any backwards 
> incompatible way. However, I do want to think about what the much more 
> configurable 1.1 API will look like.

You're right that the current 1.1 API is a mess.  I'd go to a simple
constructor that only specifies the OutputStream, and then have methods
to set various features and properties: setExclusiveMode(boolean b),
getExclusiveMode(), setCommentsMode(boolean b), getCommentsMode(),
setAlgorithm(String algorithm), getAlgorithm().

In this way, each feature has only a linear cost rather than an
exponential one.  (You could also use the SAX feature approach with URIs,
but I think it's overkill, required in SAX because SAX is an interface
and can't have an open-ended API.)

-- 
John Cowan  jcowan AT reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  
www.ccil.org/~cowan
"The exception proves the rule."  Dimbulbs think: "Your counterexample proves
my theory."  Latin students think "'Probat' means 'tests': the exception puts
the rule to the proof."  But legal historians know it means "Evidence for an
exception is evidence of the existence of a rule in cases not excepted from."