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Message-Id: <3.0.6.32.20001216011157.00a2ae70@latcs2.cs.latrobe.edu.au>
Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2000 01:11:57 +1100
To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
From: Peter Donald <donaldp@apache.org>
Subject: Re: Anteater...  I'm Baaaack...
Cc: <ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
In-Reply-To: <001101c066a0$550a1ae0$d314730a@dot.state.oh.us>
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At 09:07  15/12/00 -0500, James Cook wrote:
>Sounds like an agenda exists where DOM is not welcome. Maybe this is a wise
>choice, but then again, maybe it is due to some ignorance. I wish I was
more of
>an expert on the details of XML parsing, but I would liken your (and others
>objections) to the DOM as being "ugly" to my first impressions of Swing.
Coming

Well I have been using W3C DOM for years back when the only parser round
was openXML ;) Have a look around - there is very few projects who are
starting now (which develope with java) who actually use DOM. Now why do
you think that is ?

>from the Delphi world, I thought Swing was very ugly and made me work
twice as
>hard as I should of. In the end, I was simply ignorant of the design
principals
>behind Swing.

It is because of the design principles that DOM is so unwieldy and ugly. It
was designed to be cross-language (same interface in c++/java/other oo
languages) and as such has a lot of cruft and can not use the best features
of each language.

>I have been watching JDOM with interest since it was first announced, and
I have
>been subscribed to the mailing list since early this year. JDOM is not a
strike
>against the DOM, in fact I would say that it is an reaffirmation of DOM. They
>recognize that working directly with DOM is unwieldy and that the current XML
>specifications contain a good deal of complexity that most developers can do
>without.

Well if by DOM you mean a tree object model then JDOM affirms it ... as
does the proposals architectures - however when I think DOM i definetly
think w3c DOM and in that case JDOM is definetly a strike against it ;) I
don't know any developer who would choose to use w3c dom after using JDOM ;)

>Regardless of your final choice on an internal model structure for Ant 2.0, I
>would urge you to develop with interfaces in mind. 

I agree - see my proposal ;)

>Please allow different
>implementations to coexist and be submitted to the Build engine. If done
>properly, you should be able to allow both object model implementations or
DOM
>implementations to peacefully co-exist.

right.

Cheers,

Pete

*-----------------------------------------------------*
| "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind, |
| and proving that there is no need to do so - almost |
| everyone gets busy on the proof."                   |
|              - John Kenneth Galbraith               |
*-----------------------------------------------------*