[josm-dev] New GPX implementation

[Frederik Ramm]

Henrik,

 > No one interested?

I read your post and I didn't like it, but did not want to spoil your fun.

First of all, JOSM is not a playground for "trying out new 
technologies". If there's a good reason for introducing something new 
(and the increased complexity that comes with it) then fine. But the 
problems you mentioned were:

> 1. The GpxWriter doesn't respect the order of xml elements and can
> create invalid files

I had not heard about this problem and I'm sure it can be fixed easily 
if it really is a problem.

> 2. It is not type safe and has problems with element types other than
> String. See ticket #2359.

This bug should also be easy to fix, instead of rewriting the whole GPX 
handling.

> 3. JOSM is able to read any valid GPX 1.0/1.1 and write it back as GPX 1.1

JOSM is not a GPX editor. I don't see much use in writing GPX at all, 
and even if we do write GPX, I don't see why JOSM should convert between 
1.0 and 1.1.

> 4. Many of the GPX features are not implemented yet and have to be
> implemented manually, if they are needed in the future, while the JAXB
> implementation comes with full support for all elements

We don't normally develop stuff "for future use" because in 90% of cases 
it gets never used and just bloats the code.

I'm not into GPX a lot; I load traces into JOSM and that's it. So if 
those who use GPX more than I do all say "hooray, we've been waiting for 
these changes, finally we can read our GPX 1.0 files and save them as 
GPX 1.1" or whatever, then fine.

But at least to *me* it sounds as if the concrete issues - namely the 
ordering of elements and the type problem - could have been fixed in a 
few lines of code, and you instead decided to overthrow the whole GPX 
stuff, introducing a host of potential problems and incompatibilities 
with plugins for little apparent gain.

I'm not convinced that the positive sides outweigh the negative 
consequences but I'm willing to let others decide. Maybe I am really 
underestimating the advantages of JAXB, whatever that is.

Bye
Frederik

PS: Whether or not we should switch to Java 1.6 is another matter. I 
think that Dirk recently said that we have very little Java 1.5 users.

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"