Re: Java and XML

[Ron Cordell <roncordell@attbi.com>]

On Tuesday 19 February 2002 10:41 am, Kevin O'Neill Stoll wrote:
> Got a question about Java and XML:
>
>     Let's say you are interacting with some sort of Session bean and the
> method you are going to access is going to return a collection. It seems to
> me that you could do this just as easily by returning an XML string to the
> client. The problem that I am having is that I can't find anyone who
> supports this idea, via examples or in technical articles, so it makes me
> wonder if I am wrong but I just don't know it yet :P
>
>
>     As well, I spoke to a VB developer friend of mine and they use XML to
> pass a method parameters. He said this was extremely useful because if he
> wants to add a parameter to a public method that he does not have to break
> his binary compatibility. Once again, this sounds great for Java but I have
> not been able to find any examples in how-to's or technical articles.
>
>
>     I'm interested in hearing some feedback on the up's and down's of using
> XML to send parameters and return collections or lists. As well as, where I
> might find some examples of how someone else has implemented it.
>
>
> Thank you,
>
> Kevin O'Neill Stoll
> http://kevinstoll.org/
> (770) 569-7251

Wouldn't you have to instantiate an XML parser to then access the nodes that 
you were interested in for the collection? Unless there was some specific 
advantage to doing it with XML, why do it that way?

-ronc