Re: DOoMed

August 27th, 2007

Elliotte argues to deprecate DOM (via Stefan Tilkov). I totally agree, its probably one of the worst things that has ever happened to Java, let along the multitude of other languages.

A couple thoughts regarding the Java world and DOM:

  • XOM would probably be come a defacto DOM standard for Java if Elliotte licensed as BSD, ASL, CDDL, or CPL. IMO CDDL would accomplish the same aims as LGPL, but it comes without the perception problem and ambiguity that LGPL has. I’ve emailed Eliotte about this many times, but I don’t think he really cares about this issue.
  • The biggest gripe I have with XOM is that it doesn’t use interfaces, which makes bridging different data sources, like W3C DOMs or XML databases, inefficient.
  • Any new DOM standard for Java will need to have a W3C DOM support.
  • Functional but ugly: DOM4J (please use javax.xml.QName), JDOM (probably my favorite out of this list), AXIOM
  • Is it worth starting a JSR to define a better DOM? Will ERH lead it? :-)

10 Responses to “Re: DOoMed”

  1. Paul Brown Says:

    No JSR, please, but otherwise, hear, hear!

  2. Paul T Says:

    all these other suggests to replace DOM are okay, but do any of them have xpath’ing capabilities?

    i’d gladly move away from using DOM if i could find an easy way to pull information from an XML file, w/o having to reparse it every time.

  3. jzhang Says:

    VTD-XML would be ideal for that
    Try VTD+XML
    http://webservices.sys-con.com/read/453082.htm

  4. Tatu (Cowtown Coder) Says:

    Paul T, all of them support xpath. Besides, you don’t need xpath to avoid reparsing.

    As to standardization, while de facto standards can form just by dominance of the best implementation, this is very unlikely to happen with existing java DOM replacements, with or without JSR. But JSR would not necessarily be a bad idea, given there are multiple reasonably good tree models/implementations.

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