When the simple gets complicated: XPath from applets

Those who have read my introduction to XML will be familiar with my mixed feelings on this "technology". In principle, the idea of a standardised, human-readable data format is a handy one. Just in practice, the XML frameworks that are supposed to take the work out of reading this data end up being fundamentally infuriating for some reason.

Of the irritating options available, the XPath API is about the least tedious. Essentially, the idea is that you can call an evaluate() method, passing in a "path" into the XML document by which you refer to elements (data) in the document. Java's standard implementation is stupidly faffy, making you mess around with document builders and configuration exceptions and god knows what other nonesense that you really shouldn't have to care about. But as I say, of the various frustrating options available, it's still about the least frustrating.

At least, until you come to use it in an applet. Picture the scene: my beautiful XML-consuming applet nearing completion and tested locally, I excitedly gmail my colleague to let him know I'll have it up on the web for testing shortly. Then imagine my dismay when the selfsame applet uploaded to the web fails to initialise. Half an hour or so of frustrating debuggery later, it turns out that the culprit is the XPath.evaluate() method, inside whose gubbinery a network fetch is being made for some spurious property on every single attempt to read a piece of data from an XML document. Vive la pluggable architecture.

As I explain on the page, the workaround I found for this was to explicitly set the system property being looked for to its default value via a call to System.setProperty(). For this, alas, the jar must be signed. But I decided that even signing the jar would be less frustrating than re-writing my code to avoid the XPath API. That's how desperate I was by that stage.

With the jar signed, my colleague is now free to accept the warning message about the apocalyptic consequences of running my applet and proceed with testing. Ginger programmer 1, frustrating API nil. For now.