Re: [Freemarker-devel] Freemarker marketing?

[Jonathan R. <re...@te...>]

Daniel Dekany wrote:
> Monday, June 27, 2005, 3:11:10 PM, Attila Szegedi wrote:
> 
> 
>>On Fri, 24 Jun 2005 22:19:26 +0200, Daniel Dekany <dd...@fr...>
>>wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>I don't have any more inclination to go look for a separate DOM
>>>>library when one is in the JDK than I do to go look for a separate
>>>>regexp library. I just don't see the point of suffering the versioning
>>>>issues and so on.
>>>
>>>Let me not tell loudly here what can they do with some of the crap they
>>>include with the J2SE and J2EE platforms. I will try to use the
>>>best-of-the-breed stuff (and this way I'm also supporting them against
>>>the industrial stupidity).
>>>
>>
>>Let me add that DOM was never designed for Java -- DOM is a language
>>independent specification that got "ported" to a variety of languages,
>>incl. Java. As such, it's fabulously weakly typed, and you often need
>>to do lots of casts and wondering what method returns what object when
>>applied to what type of node. At least in these regards, dom4j is
>>miles ahead of DOM's Java flavor. I'm saying dom4j 'cause I don't know
>>about JDOM - it had its own share of problems, so nowadays I use dom4j
>>for all my XML tree processing needs.
> 
> 
> Have you tried XOM?
> 


I'm sure any alternative API is somewhat nicer to use than the W3C DOM. 
Nonetheless, in terms of deeper structure, all of these things are 
identical. You are navigating a tree of nodes with attributes.

The fact remains that, when something is included in the core java 
platform, as a practical matter, given the huge advantage of the classes 
just always being there in rt.jar, the alternative thing has to be more 
than just a little bit better to be worth bothering with. I have a hard 
time seeing how the alternative DOM API's are worth the bother.

Similarly, FreeMarker has to be more than just a little bit better than 
JSP. But I think it is. (Though we have to get some momentum going again 
to keep it that way.)

JR