i've used JAXP and SAX APIs pretty heavily and i can't say i notice much difference, but Fop is decidedly unhappy with jdk1.4, which lacks xml.serialize.
As far as i can tell xml.serialize is only used at build time for extracting font data in FOP. I personally run FOP in an environment without Xerces/Xalan and therefore lacking the serialization features without problems (using Saxon).
interesting! i had no such luck de-contenting, at least using a binary distro of Fop.
this is too hard. i just want to use Fop with tomcat.
Can you describe your problems a little bit more detailed?
tomcat comes with xerces or crimson. the new 4.0.2-LE-jdk1.4 distro comes with nothing but uses crimson (jaxp) and whatever xalan is in jdk1.4.
by "comes with", i mean there are directories $TOMCAT/common/lib and $TOMCAT/server/lib for putting .jar files in. things in common/lib are available to tomcat itself and applications, things in server/lib are available only to tomcat.
i have my own xml library that runs on top of sax or jaxp with minor changes, so i need something in common/lib. it took me a couple days to get tomcat 4.0.1, my stuff, and Fop-0.20.3rc all using the same world (xerces/xalan), and now i see this apparent push to go back to jaxp/crimson.
it shouldn't matter, but it does, and it's unpleasant to have trouble combining projects from apache.org. so i'm hoping to see some consolidation, or at least agreement of what toolsets things will be using.
i think having an LE-jdk1.4 edition of tomcat is nice in principle - fewer .jar files to deploy is easier on everyone - but if the result is more forks elsewhere in the developer community, well..
