[taglibs] Trying to use JAXP XPath instead of raw Xalan

[Jeremy Boynes]

On Dec 22, 2010, at 1:01 AM, Rex Wang wrote:
>>> 
>>> Why not move to the standard api in jdk instead of defining new apis and
>>> wrappers?


I put together an API to abstract the XPath implementation and tried to use the 
JAXP XPath support; see
        https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=27717#c21 

There's a problem in JAXPXPathExpression#evaluateObject() where it needs to 
return the actual result of evaluating the XPath (boolean, String, Number or 
"node-set"). However, the XPath API requires you to specify a specific return 
type:
        
http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/javax/xml/xpath/XPathExpression.html#evaluate(java.lang.Object,%20javax.xml.namespace.QName)

Any ideas on how to work around that would be appreciated, otherwise we will be 
forced to use a proprietary API.

Cheers
Jeremy