[jdom-interest] jdom and dom4j

[bob mcwhirter]

> The fact JDOM is going through the JCP process as an official JSR isn't
> mentioned either.

I thought we'd gone over this a few times, and decided that the JSR status
was basically meaningless?

Am I wrong, or is the fact JDOM is a JSR only means that JDOM will be using
the JCP for its own development, but implies nothing regarding the "Java
Standard".  If/when JSR 102 reaches maturity, will org.jdom.* become
a part of the JDK or JAXPacks?  (or, renamed to javax.xml.tree.*, or
whatnot?)

> Looking just at the facts on the page, JDOM now has integrated XPath (as
> of the latest CVS code) and we've had integrated JAXP/TRaX support for
> quite a long time.  Both of those bullet items should be updated.  
> 
> The "Massive documents" and "event-based processing" items probably
> refer to dom4j's feature to only build parts of the tree.  Laurent wrote
> similar code for JDOM.  Look at the "spanner" code in jdom-contrib.  If
> it becomes popular and people like the API, we'll make it core.

I think, in both cases, he's comparing out-of-the-box with out-of-the-box,
ignoring contrib'd projects.  I think.  I could certainly be wrong.

> Hmm, dom4j says "built on Java interfaces".  What that probably should
> say is it's built on its own interfaces.  Both dom4j and JDOM support
> standard interfaces like java.util.List, Cloneable, and so on.

Interface-based as opposed to concrete-class based, is the point he's
trying to make, I think.

> Hmm, other interesting features that aren't mentioned are whether the
> API can *output* a document.  DOM L2 doesn't even support that in a
> standard manner.  I suspect there's a lot of features that could be
> added to a list like this.  Perhaps we should write a comparison chart
> on the JDOM site.

There's been quite a few charts/tables comparing JDOM to DOM in many
regards.  But typically, the folks constructing the charts/tables
ignore dom4j completely.  dom4j hasn't gotten nearly the press 
attention as JDOM.  

	-bob