[jdom-interest] Introduction. JDOM for Java5?

Spencer Marks smarks at digisolutions.com
Thu Jan 26 13:34:40 PST 2006


I've had and talked with people who have had similar problems with  
older versions of JDOM embedded in app servers.

I am willing to bet you are using IBM's WebSphere.

In any case, I tend to blame the tool vendors not JDOM for this.

JDOM Beta 7 was released on 07.07.2001 - almost five years ago. Tool  
vendors need to do  a better job of keeping up to date or providing  
patches for situations like this.

As far as the API changing goes, if we where talking about a released  
version (like version 1.0) I'd agree. It should be stable, but we are  
talking about beta version here.
Betas are not supposed to locked down. The very notion of beta means  
the code is influx  and being refined. Sometimes those refinements  
mean API changes. Developers and tool vendors should anticipate that  
beta versions might not be backwards compatibility and take the  
appropriate steps.

But it is definitely frustrating.  It seems like at least some of the  
big tool vendors just doesn't pay enough attention to important  
details like this.  I think they should. Unfortunately, it is often  
easier to use a different library than get the tool vendor to do the  
right thing. And that's a shame, especially in cases like JDOM which  
I find really useful (not to mention easy to use).


Spencer


On Jan 26, 2006, at 3:39 PM, Phil Weighill Smith wrote:

>
>
> We've actually moved away from using JDOM for the reason that our
> products have to work with various web and app servers. A number of
> these servers actually use old (e.g. 0.7) versions of the library  
> which
> are not API compatible even against the version (0.9) that we were  
> using
> and would have issues simply because they expose the library to  
> embedded
> web applications.



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