[jdom-interest] JDOMException and JDK 1.4

[Alex Rosen]

JDK 1.4 has a new exception chaining mechanism, where you can specify that one
exception is the "cause" of another exception. See java.lang.Throwable in
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/api/index.html.

JDOM (along with a number of other APIs) has its own way of doing this, with
JDOMException. It seems like a good idea to use the same method names in
JDOMException as with the new Throwable (e.g. getCause() instead of
getRootCause()). Same goes for BeanMapperException in contrib. Of course, we'd
still need to keep the methods' implementations rather than just using
Throwable's, so we can still run on earlier JDKs. We'd deprecate and eventually
remove the existing method names.

I'd be happy to submit a patch. Any opinions?

Alex Rosen
SilverStream Software