Warning, I've swerved dangerously off topic... ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Peterson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > On Thu, 2002-03-21 at 09:25, James Strachan wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From: "bob mcwhirter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > > Though I do like the idea of a generic XPath object too. The use case is > > JSTL (the JSP Standard Tag Library) which has a bunch of XPath related tags > > which are based on XPath. It would be really cool to have a flexible XPath > > implementation that could autodetect whether a JSP user was working with > > DOM, dom4j, EXML, JDOM et al - provided the performance overhead is pretty > > minimal. > > That's a good example. I knew there was some reason this came up before > :) There are still going to be issues with actually using the results of > the XPath once it is returned, though. Though from memory, with the > JSTL, the result would just be used as a JavaBean, using other tags (eg > <jx:getProperty ...> etc).
Actually it turns out that most of the time the JSTL XML tags are used you never actually see the object model - the tags mostly avoid needing to actually use it explicitly. Of course a developer may wish to use parts of the model or result nodes or whatnot - but typically the model is mostly invisible - they are all just sources of XML. Its a little like XSLT - you don't use any DOM APIs in a typical XSLT stylesheet. I'm actually quite proud of the XML tags in JSTL - they are pretty much the core tags from XTags which have been improved somewhat thanks to the efforts of the expert group (though unfortunately they've lost a little of their XSLT flavour to be a bit more JSTL-like). http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/doc/xtags-doc/intro.html Maybe one day a minimal XML tree could be implemented thats only purpose in life is to store XML in a fast & efficient form and that is easy and fast to evaluate XPaths on as possible - then the JSTL tags could use that instead. i.e. that if you only want XPath and don't want a cross-language API like DOM or a nice API like dom4j or a simple API like JDOM :-) then there could be a better, faster implementation. Especially if the model is read-only. e.g. Attributes could be implemented as an array. Michael Kay has done some good work in this area in Saxon, we could do something similar one day in Jaxen too. James _______________________________________________ Jaxen-interest mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jaxen-interest
