No more WOXML

Forget what I wrote in the last post – I was a little too eager to report about my findings. It will work as long as you don’t have relationships in both directions – for example, a one-to-many relationship, in which case you’ll need to make a many-to-many relationship.

I’m so fed up with this crappy framework. I can’t believe how Apple can release something of such unbelievably poor quality. Next time I will use the Castor XML stuff right from the beginning. My advice to you is to stay away from this framework, or at least not committing to time schedule unless you’ve made a prototype that does what your code will do, in order to verify that what you want to do works.

You use a framework because it does something that would take much work to do yourself. But WOXML appears to be powerful and easy to use, but when you’ve started using it, it reveals its true nature: a bug-ridden tarpit. When you do something wrong (for example when setting up the mapping model), the feedback it provides in terms of exceptions raised is useless. For example, it wraps exceptions in its own WOXMLException, but doesn’t document that you can access the original exception with originalException(), or it says something like “expected ’</myElement>’” although the XML is correct, but the real error is in the mapping file.

It’s so frustrating when something that just should work forces you to spend days trying to find out workarounds for bugs. You have been warned!