Bill Roper's Journal

I have been pulling my hair out trying to figure out why my XML reading code is misbehaving. I fix it in one place and it all works fine. Then I go to another project and the same code fails.

Today, I managed to convince myself (correctly) that the nice new unit tests that I wrote work in one environment, but not in the other. This is not a happy situation.

It turns out that my XML reading code that was "working" was only working because I had hacked it to work with an underlying XML reading JAR that was broken. With a correct version of an XML reading JAR, the hacked version won't work. You have to have the *correct* code on my side to make it work.

But, of course, the *correct* code will not work with the broken JAR.

I have given up and changed my XML reading code so it no longer uses the broken method in the broken JAR.

And now it works no matter which set of JARs gets loaded.

Blort.

All this talk of JARs is making me hungry. Maybe a jar of strawberry jam and some fresh rolls can be found. Or something like that.