Which XPathAPI should I use in Java 1.5?

Question

I have been using com.sun.org.apache.xpath.internal.XPathAPI for some time and it seems to work ok. Recently I tried to use the TPTP profiler in Eclipse but it could not find the XPathAPI class.

I haven't figured this problem yet but it did make me wonder whether I should be using a class in an 'internal' package? Should I be using the Xalan library? Or what??

(I'm currently using JRE 1.5.0_06 for this project)

Answer 1

We use jdom but apache commons is always a good choice for everything.

Answer 2

All classes under the com.sun package are internal implementation details. You should never reference them directly.

The base for xPath in the JDK is javax.xml.xpath.

Answer 3

Use the XPathFactory.newInstance() method in the javax.xml.path package.

I think this was introduced in Java 1.5. If you have to revert to Java 1.4 or earlier, I think you have to use the com.sun packages, which is never really a good idea (but sometimes unavoidable)

Answer 4

If performance is any sort of issue, whatever you do, don't use Xalan for this. The Xalan XPathAPI interface is very slow. We wrap Jaxen to provide an XPathAPI-like interface. That is vastly quicker.

Answer 5

I dropped in the Xalan jar (2.7.0) and used org.apache.xpath.XPathAPI in the import and the deprecation messages went away.