[jsword-devel] OSIS vs JAXB

[Joe Walker]

By playing around I discovered that swapping to JDOM is actually quite 
easy so I propose that we do it, I've got to a fairly compile clean 
state, but it doest actually work, so I'm not done yet.

JDOM might not be the best answer - my thoughts.

Of the 4 types of XML API, we can rule out the Binding types, like JAXB, 
Castor and XMLBeans. From my reading JAXB may well be the poorest, but 
the will all suffer from the same schema problems and so some extent the 
same bloat problems.
Push Streaming APIs like SAX and XNI, and to a lesser extent Pull 
Streaming APIs like XMLPull are OK for reading XML, but not for writing 
and are fairly hard to use even for reading.
Of the Tree based APIs that are common, DOM has a reputation for being 
hard to use and is inflexible in not allowing re-parenting or element 
cloning, however this may well have been fixed in recent versions. I 
think the JAXP in JDK1.4 still has these problems though.
DOM4J and ElecticXML are supposed to be easy to use but don't often to 
the Right Thing from an XML point of view. JDOM has a JSR so it is 
likely to be around for a while, and we use it already. XOM is similar 
to JDOM, but is leaner, less used and doesn't use Collections.

So my gut reaction is to stick with JDOM. Any comments?

XOM links if you are interested:
Home - http://www.cafeconleche.org/XOM/
OReilly - http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/11/27/xom.html
ERH Presentation - http://www.cafeconleche.org/XOM/whatswrong/text0.html

Joe.

DM Smith wrote:
> As to performance, the dom is full featured so the core is pretty big. 
> With large answer sets, we may need to do lazy construction of the 
> document. That is as each tab is populated, we build just the document 
> for that page. If we do this the core will not grow too large.

We do currently do that. However it occurs to me that one of the changes 
that I'd contemplated broke that. I need to remember that.