At Ephox we are pretty heavy users of the Java text APIs. In some respects the EditLive! team probably knows more about them than anyone in the world. In a Creative Coding Afternoon recently, I was doing some work on a cool plugin for EditLive! (it might make it into a future release of Enterprise Edition), and after spending time getting angry with the Swing document (some of the anger was justified). I had an epiphany. I expect that the actual revelation will not matter to any outside of Ephox (ok so people who want to work for ephox might be interested), but I'm going to share it anyway.

The Swing Document model != the DOM. Don't expect it to look like the DOM. Don't expect it to be the HTML DOM. The subclass HTMLDocument is not the DOM. While you can access all the information in the DOM, you should not expect there to be a direct mapping between concepts in the DOM and in the Swing Document model. You can expect all the information in the DOM to be available in the Swing Document model, but it isn't going to look exactly like the DOM. The Swing Document model is a generic model for presenting a document for us in a rich text editor, which means the DOM is transformed to work with the Swing Document model.

Once you can get your head around this, the Swing Text APIs can begin to make more sense (although I'm still grumpy about the lack of working with the java.util.collections properly).

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 5:28 am and is filed under Ephox, Java. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.