Using XML-based object structures to represent data in code/at run-time
Hello,
I have quite a "high level" question which has be bothering me for some time, and I haven't found the subject tackled in any books. I believe J2SE/J2EE is not an important divide here.
Lets say I want to develop a J2SE game application with two programs: a "level designer", and a "level viewer", and I want to store the level files in an XML format.
My question, and I use this example only to try and illustrate it, is:
when coding the level designer or viewer, is it reasonable to use an XML-based object hierarchy for representing a level in code/at run-time, i.e. using the standard Java DOM APIs? Or should one (as I would have done before XML came along) develop a set of classes much closer to modelling the real form of a level, and then add a means to convert those objects to/from to XML format?
This second option of course I would use/would have used if I wasn't thinking about XML, but isn't it sometimes easier to just read in an XML file into a DOM representation and just use the data straight out of that structure, rather than go through the bother of parsing the XML into a set of unrelated objects defined by a different family of classes? What shapes your decision here? And if the second option is best, what is the easiest way of converting to/from the XML?
Thank you for any advice.
Greg
