XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Wolfgang Hoschek <wolfgang.hoschek AT mac.com>]

I'd really love to reuse nu.xom.XPathContext for XQuery, but to do so  
realistically one needs a way to get hold of the entire set of stored  
namespace declarations. For simplicity, I'd advocate to add a single  
corresponding method to XPathContext:

/**
 * Returns the namespace declarations stored in this context.
 *
 * @return an unmodifiable map of prefix --> URI associations
 *         where prefix and URI are non-empty strings.
 */
public Map getNamespaces() {
            return Collections.unmodifiableMap(this.namespaces);
//          return new HashMap(this.namespaces); // less efficient
}

Assuming that happens, it might be considerable to remove the public  
XPathContext.lookup() method as mostly obsolete - if needed it can be  
expressed in terms of getNamespaces(). I think there's no  
compatibility issue since lookup() was only tentatively added in the  
1.2 beta series.

Wolfgang.

> Being able to iterate over things does make working with XML easier:
>
>        for(Node n:message.xpath("muws-p2-xs:StateTransition/*",  
> catalog)) {
>             SoapElement e=(SoapElement) n;
>             //act on the element
>         }
> -steve