RE: [Rsslibj-developer] licenses

[Joseph O. <jo...@en...>]

On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Danny Ayers wrote:

> I'm not familiar with EXML (or jdom for that matter), though it's not hard
> to imagine how it would be able to make things easier than JAXP. However, I
> don't think JAXP's all *that* bad - specifically :
>
> > Porting the XML to JAXP has been considered. However, JAXP is very
> > difficult to work with, compared to EXML; EXML handles generation of the
> > XML for you from a DOM, for example, where JAXP requires manual
> > generation.
>
> API implementations (such as Xerces) usually have fairly simple
> serialization available, though outside of JAXP proper. It's also possible
> to serialize using javax.xml.transform, see :
> http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/books/xmljava/chapters/ch09s09.html
> "Using JAXP to both read and write an XML document"

Yes, but it's also not as pretty or as elegant as EXML's. Furthermore:

> > Also, JAXP handles namespacing very poorly.
>
> If I remember correctly, the first release of JAXP, maybe a couple of years
> ago, didn't have *any* support for namespaces, but as far as I know the
> current version & implementations handle namespaces as well as one would
> expect.
>

Oh, no. Actually, the namespacing in JAXP is *predeterminate* where
namespacing in XML is not. Consider RDF. Here's the "normal" declaration:

<rdf:RDF
  xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
  xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
  xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"
> ...

Now, consider this EQUALLY VALID declaration:

<foo:RDF
  xmlns:foo="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
  xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
  xmlns="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/"
>

JAXP does not support this. In JAXP, you have to search for the actual
name of the element, including namespace, so you have to search for
"rdf:RDF" and not "namespace locally referred to as rdf" and "RDF", the
way EXML does it. The second decl should work in EXML. It has no chance in
JAXP.

---------------------------------------------------------
Joseph B. Ottinger                 jo...@en...
http://enigmastation.com                    IT Consultant