I've often wondered that a simple & small API could be used to access
information from XML using just XPath to do all the work. Then XPath becomes
an alternative for a DOM API.
This only works for reading information so I'm not sure how useful this is
in general but I just thought I'd share my musings with the list to see what
others thought.
e.g imagine something like this...
/** evaluates XPath expressions */
public interface X {
// iterate through the nodeset results of the expression
public Iterator iterator( String expression );
public String valueOf( String expression );
public boolean test( String expression );
// gets a new X for the given XPath expression
public X eval( String expression );
// getters & setters for variable, function & namespace contexts
// go here, left out for brevity...
}
Then we could use it to do things like this...
X doc = ...;
// now lets use it...
Iterator iter = doc.iterator( "//foo" );
while (iter.hasNext() ) {
X foo = (X) iter.next();
String name = foo.valueOf( "@name" );
X bars = foo.eval( "bar" );
if ( bars.test( "x[@p='23']" ) {
...
}
}
To create the initial doc could be from an exisitng model, or via an XPath
expression. e.g.
// create an X from somewhere either via
X doc = new Xdom4j( aDocument );
// use an empty X to start with...
X x = X.create();
X doc = x.eval( "document('/a/b/c.xml' )" );
James
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