Re: [Xmlunit-general] Comparison.getControlDetails().getTarget()

[Stefan B. <bo...@ap...>]

On 2015-02-28, Harald Brabenetz wrote:

> I made the changes:
> https://github.com/brabenetz/xmlunit/commit/3f824ef2b7cb348efea76b85d3d5a35da7fe8550

> If the DOMDifferenceEngine is the one and only implementation, then I
> think embrace DOM as part of XMLUnit's diff API is fine,

> But if there is another implementation then DOMDifferenceEngine
> planned, then it's maybe (depends on the other implementations) better
> to reject the changes.

Somewhere in the back of my head is the idea of a pull model based
DifferencEngine that would need to sacrifice certain features (most
importantly it could only match nodes in order so we'd lose the whole
ElementSelector business) but would be way more memory efficient for big
documents.  DOM really is a memory hog on both platforms we support.

For .NET constructing XmlNodes for the state of an XmlReader would be
easy, for Java we'd be burdened by providing our own implementations of
the DOM interfaces on top of StAX.  Not a big deal, but still something
that had to be done.

OTOH I'm not convinced said "stream" DifferenceEngine would be used
much.  After all most people - at least those who report problems with
XMLUnit - seem to be using ElementQualifiers (now ElementSelectors) of
some sort in order to deal with permutations of elements.

Stefan