Re: [Jsynthlib-devel] JDom dependancy

[Joe E. <jo...@em...>]

Joachim Backhaus wrote:
> since when does JSynthLib depend on JDom?
>   
Please see my post to the developers' list dated Feb 22. 2006, when I 
added XML saving of patch data.
> This weekend I tried to compile the newest JSynthLib
> from the CVS source and got an error message because
> I don't have JDom installed.
>   
I thoughts I added the jdom.jar to CVS. So you should only need to 
include it in your classpath along with groovy.jar.
> IMHO JSynthLib shouldn't use external libraries if
> it cannot be avoided.
>   
I agree whole-heartedly. However, JDOM was the only sensible 
object-oriented XML library I could find for Java. Plain Java has SAX 
and DOM parsers built-in, but all of the examples I've seen for them are 
very ugly. Indeed, *some* of the examples I saw for *writing* XML with 
the built-in SAX and DOM didn't even *use* the XML classes at *all*. 
They just use print statements to print the XML directly... leaving the 
developer responsible for all formatting and well-formedness issues 
(like this one: 
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava/chapters/ch03s02.html).

Meanwhile, JDOM allows for the developer to deal with the XML document 
in a completly object-oriented manner. It's so much of an improvement 
that some are expecting that JDOM will eventually be incorporated into 
J2SE (http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/results?id=93). So, part of why I 
decided to include jdom.jar is because I expect that, someday, we'll be 
able to remove it when JDOM (or some other object-oriented XML suite) 
becomes part of the standard J2SE implementation.

Lastly, I included it because *somebody* (cough, cough...) already 
included groovy.jar... and that's about 10x as big as jdom.jar.

- Joe