[jsword-devel] OSIS vs JAXB

[Joe Walker]

Hi,

We've discussed this before, but I'm wondering if we made the wrong 
decision in going to JAXB. I think there are 2 questions we need to 
consider.
1. Should we change, and what to?
2. If we do decide to change should we do it before 1.0?

The problems with JAXB are:
- Download size. As of OSIS 1.1 the generated classes weigh in at about 
1Mb and the jar files that depends on come to about 4Mb!
- Lack of non-validating mode. This is a problem for 2 reasons, Sword 
modules (and probably those from other sources too) are not valid OSIS, 
and the spec changes, and we could be left having to use several XSDs 
which would make the code complex and huge.
- Minor niggle, JAXB does not give you a getParent() method which is 
very annoying.
- The license isn't OSS although it does allow redistribution.

My guess is that swapping JAXB to something else (JDOM being obvious 
because we use it already, but we could think about DOM4J. XOM, 
XMLBeans, etc) would be a day or 2 of total carnage, followed by 
something potentially slightly slower, but a lot smaller and far more 
flexible.

Thoughts?

Joe.