--- James Duncan Davidson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 12/14/00 8:27 PM, "James Cook" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > If the only object to DOM is overhead then I think we have a topic for > > discussion. As a developer, I have a few XML parsers (Xerces, Sun's > parser > > that is packaged with JAXP, JDOM) installed, and they all support DOM. > I > > think we have to remember that this is a developer tool. Why restrict > its > > simplicity and elegance by throwing out a perfectly acceptable library? > I > > don't understand the objection, especially when you look at Simeon's > elegant > > use of DOM in Antidote. > > DOM is a "document" object model which is generalized to work with a > large > number of abstract and anonymous nodes. Ant works with Projects which > have > very specified nodes of Targets, Tasks, Properties, etc. There is no need > to > use a generic library when what you are wanting to do is work with very > specific type information. DOM doesn't preserve any of that type > information, except as strings.
For what it's worth (and I know I've lost this battle), I have been able to provide strongly typed Project, Target, Task and Property classes in Antidote that mirror the ones in the Ant core, while at the same time implementing the DOM interfaces. In otherwords I have a "docuement" object model that also provides specific type information. *Please* take a look at the classes in jakarta-ant/src/antidote/org/apache/tools/ant/gui/acs. It's not perfect, nor 100% appropriate for use in an Ant core, but I think that it proves that you /can/ have the best of both worlds. And it only took me about 5 hours to implement this data model that is both strongly typed (in an Ant sense)and implements DOM semantics. And there is no "overhead" that I've noticed on my vintage class development box. The one really bad thing about it is that I rely on Sun's JAXP implementation, which I'm sticking to until you guys settle on the data model for Ant 2.0. I did this so I could focus on the more interesting parts rather than futzing with XML parsing/data model generation that will becode OBE/DOA for Ant 2.0. But I encourage a look as it does offer a different perspective on data model building than has been presented so far (I think). sim ===== Mustard Seed Software mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Shopping - Thousands of Stores. Millions of Products. http://shopping.yahoo.com/
