Every time I work with XML I am amazed at how painful Java XML APIs are. Sure they work but they always take the most circuitous and illogical route to solving the problem. They're always un-intuitive.

What developer likes creating a factory through a static initializer, instantiating an esoteric parser I don't care about, handing an InputStream (you always have one of those sitting around) to an awkwardly named method that returns something with 50 methods, none of which seem to get me the information I want.

I'm working with XPath again and even with that useful API I'm still exposed to so much complexity when all I want is data out of a document. blog comments powered by Disqus