Zoom in on XOM

Today’s kudos go to the profusely productive Elliotte Rusty Harold and the XML model called XOM. To quote the XOM web site, XOM is

an open source (LGPL), tree-based API for processing XML with Java that strives for correctness, simplicity, and performance, in that order

Among the design principles, there is one I particularly like: An API is written by experts for non-experts. Great, I simply don’t want to learn all the intricacies of namespaces etc. I just want the API to tell me if I’m heading the wrong way.

My confidence in this package has grown over time. I have used XOM primarily to juggle Docbook documents, using XSLT and XPath. The application has been in production for a while and has performed without a hitch.

It’s a pity that DOM didn’t reach this level of excellence. There is a Swedish saying, “Many cooks, little taste.”