Re: Thought on future of XMLC

> When digging into the XMLC source code I got pretty fast 'lost' (I'm 
> no XMLC
> expert at all) but I really like the dom4j and JXPath ideas. We use
> XPath (also through JXPath) more and more in our business logic as well
> (JXPath xpath syntax on the value objects of our business beans). The
> XPath syntax is easy and _very_ powerful.

Yes, JXPath is very powerful package. Anyone who's doing heavy DOM 
programming should take a look at this package. I will post some 
example codes using JXPath with XMLC soon. Along with the ability 
addressing Java Bean using the same syntax, it will enable a very 
interesting programming for XMLC.

> Anyway, IMHO, the the next version of XMLC should be no longer
> depended on specific patched libraries. (I know, this is very quickly
> said, but has huge impact...)

This seems to be number one requested feature for the next XMLC. 
Unfortunately, I won't be able to address this in the 2.2 release. It 
would required too much work in the very core of XMLC. However, 
hopefully this can be done in the release after.

> If using the XPath syntax means we even
> don't have to pre-compile our pages any more even better!

The current reloading will lead to this feature. I am working on 
getting it happen in the 2.2 release.

> When it comes to choosing JDOM or dom4j (a bit early, I know) I think
> we should opt for dom4j for the reasons Jacob already pointed out.
> (performance and good XPath support)

Personally, I like DOM4J.

This leads to another question. How many people are depending on HTML 
DOM (and for that matter, WML, cHTML or XHTML DOM) in their code? 
Neither DOM4J or JDOM support these document specific DOM.

David