Nick, Julien, Alain,

As said before we'd like to harmonize the XML parsing accross the GateIn projects. Let's kill this once for all...

It doesn't mean we would change the existing parsers overnight but it means we will impose a way for any new parsing (or when we decide to rewrite a parser).

If we need parser tools, they will go in Common module ultimately. There might be a phase when the code will be duplicated (as Nick's tools need to work on an untouched portal where upgrading common is not an option).

We already agreed that StAX as a base was the way to go, I hope we still agree ;)

Let's separate in reading/writing XML (doesn't necessarily necessarily mean marhalling/unmarshalling BTW) and agree on both.

Reading XML:
    Option 1:
        Plain StAX, JBoss AS 7 uses that (in fact they use StAX Mapper, a very lightweight library made by the JBoss AS7 team. https://github.com/jbossas/staxmapper/ which only helps to work with multiple namespaces + some little helpers for ignoring part of the file, format the XML when writing...)
        One example of JBoss AS 7 parsing file: https://github.com/emuckenhuber/jboss-as/blob/master/web/src/main/java/org/jboss/as/web/WebSubsystemParser.java
    Option 2:
        Nick's stuff (please explain advantages/drawbacks)
    Option 3:
        Julien/Alain's stuff (please explain advantages/drawbacks)

Writing XML:
    Option 1:
        Plain StAX (well-formed guaranteed over plain Writer)
    Option 2:
        Nick's stuff (please explain advantages/drawbacks)
    Option 3:
        Julien/Alain's stuff (please explain advantages/drawbacks)

Note that there are other utilities and frameworks based on StAX:
    Stax-Utils: http://stax-utils.dev.java.net/
    StaxMate: http://wiki.fasterxml.com/StaxMateHome
    Apache Axiom: http://ws.apache.org/commons/axiom/
   
Thomas