XML APIs and JDK 1.4

[Jeff Turner <je...@socialchange.net.au>]

Hi,

On Eliotte Rusty Harold's Java news site
(http://www.cafeaulait.org/2001november.html):

"
Thursday, November 8, 2001

Sun's posted the Maintenance Review Draft Specification for
JSR-000917 J2SE 1.4 (Merlin) Beta 3. Mostly this beta makes various
minor tweaks in the API. The only major addition is an "Endorsed
Standards Override Mechanism". According to Sun,

	The Java 2 Platform includes a number of APIs that are governed
	by third-party endorsed standards. Examples are of such APIs are
	javax.rmi.CORBA.*, org.omg.*, and org.w3c.dom. Often software
	developers and vendors would like to use their own
	implementation of these APIs, or use a version of the external
	standard other than the version that is implemented in J2SE. To
	address this need, J2SE 1.4 supports the Endorsed Standards
	Override Mechansim, which makes use of new system property,
	java.endorsed.dirs.

Review closes on December 10.
"

The "Endorsed Standards Override Mechanism" is online here:

  http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/guide/standards/index.html


This looks quite significant. Without this, it seems JDK 1.4 users are
stuck forevermore with the XML standards as they currently stand (DOM 2,
SAX 2). I have not tried the 1.4 betas though.. does that sound correct?

One remaining question: will it be possible for an application to
override the default parser (crimson I think), or when 1.4 is released,
are we stuck with that parser and it's bugs?

So far, when it comes to standards, Microsoft have "embrace and extend",
and Sun have "embrace and inadvertently hold back". I wish they'd leave
XML out of the JDK, but failing that, I hope (and would like
confirmation from this group) that they haven't killed the advancement
of DOM and SAX in Java.


--Jeff

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Re: XML APIs and JDK 1.4

[Edwin Goei <ed...@sun.com>]

Jeff Turner wrote:
> 
> One remaining question: will it be possible for an application to
> override the default parser (crimson I think), or when 1.4 is released,
> are we stuck with that parser and it's bugs?

JDK 1.4 contains the JAXP 1.1 API along with the JAXP reference
implementation (RI) which includes crimson 1.1.3 and xalan D11.  JAXP
1.1 contains a pluggability feature.  As Shane mentions you can place
any JAXP compatible implementation like Xerces 2 or saxon on the
CLASSPATH and it should all work.  (BTW, there are other ways to
override the implementation in JDK 1.4 as well mentioned in the spec,
see http://xml.apache.org/~edwingo/jaxp-faq.html for pointers to more
info.)

> So far, when it comes to standards, Microsoft have "embrace and extend",
> and Sun have "embrace and inadvertently hold back". I wish they'd leave
> XML out of the JDK, but failing that, I hope (and would like
> confirmation from this group) that they haven't killed the advancement
> of DOM and SAX in Java.

The endorsed standard mechanism was designed for this and it is based on
the -Xbootclasspath mechanism that Dims mentions.

-Edwin

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