As the Javadoc for XObject says, * This class represents an XPath object, and is capable of * converting the object to various types, such as a string. * This class acts as the base class to other XPath type objects, * such as XString, and provides polymorphic casting capabilities.
Basically, XObject is the shared superclass of the various objects that the XPath API may return, and defines the behavior they all share. For your purposes, the important calls are: getType()/getTypeString() to find out which specific type of value was returned num() to reduce the returned value to a single number bool() to reduce the returned value to a single boolean str() to reduce the returned value to a single String nodeset() to reduce the returned value to a DOM-like NodeIterator ... and maybe the comparison methods (lessThan, deepEquals and so on), if you want to operate on XObjects before extracting their Java values. Most of the other calls are intended for use inside Xalan, and unless you have special needs you probably don't need to worry about them.
