Here are some of the things people are saying about JDOM. Most came from the jdom-interest mailing list.

Sun Microsystems (Comment on the JSR-102 Approval Ballot)

In general we tend to prefer to avoid adding new APIs to the Java platform which replicate the functionality of existing APIs.

However JDOM does appear to be significantly easier to use than the earlier APIs, so we believe it will be a useful addition to the platform.

Simon St. Laurent (Author, XML Elements of Style)

I think JDOM breaks down a lot of the barriers between Java and XML and makes it a more natural fit.

Elliotte Rusty Harold (Author, XML in a Nutshell & XML Bible)

At a high level, it's similar to the DOM, but since JDOM was designed specifically for Java rather than for multiple languages, it feels much more natural and "right" to Java programmers.

Anthony Eden, Signature Domains

At Signature Domains, Inc. (http://www.signaturedomains.com/) we are using JDOM in production environments for two different purposes. The first is for loading and storing configuration information. Our newer applications (both desktop and back-end) which need to load and store configuration information are using JDOM. It is so easy to use that it makes this task trivial. Eventually I plan to convert all of our applications so that they use JDOM for configuration management. ...I also use JDOM for all of my open source applications (http://www.anthonyeden.com/).

Charles L. Robinson, President of Datec

As a consultant, I have just had the pleasure of incorporating JDOM into one our client's latest applications. I must say that it was a complete pleasure to work with. Our thanks for your efforts.

Robin Meade

About 6 months ago I remember getting half way through a magazine article on DOM and thinking: "Either this article is badly written or DOM is not something I want to learn any time soon". JDOM is another story. I look forward to using it.

David Duddleston

Having used JDOM for serveral days now, I have found it much simpler to work with over DOM and especialy SAX. JDOM just flows better for a Java programmer like myself and the code you end up with is much cleaner. I like it ;-)

Tom Oinn

I'm sure it's been said many times, but there are few APIs clean and intuitive enough to be usable even without looking at the documentation. JDOM is one of these treasures and has made my life a whole load easier :) Keep it up...

Mark J Laird, Waterford.org

I have been using JDOM Beta 5 since early November. I am using it in multiple places in my current project, including data import/export (obviously), backup/restore, and error logging. It has been very easy to integrate XML into these portions of my project using JDOM, and I have not run into any bugs in the three months I have been using it. Having written a bare-bones XML parser for a previous project in C++, I was very happy to find that the work had already been done for me with JDOM. It undoubtably saved me two to three weeks of development time early on in the project cycle, as well as debugging time later on.

Todd Thal

Even a "simpleton" like myself could start to understand JDOM!!!

Jon Baer

I can't name of one way better to read/write XML docs, it rocks.... The whole JSP/Servlet/XML scenerio has to have JDOM as a must-have tool for all serious developers I would think.... Thank god for JDOM because its made life a helluva lot easier to use the files with JSP/Servlets.

Matthew Clark

It's certainly nice to see something that doesn't confuse the hell out of the developer!!

Mark Ashworth

You guys are really on to something here. This addresses many of issues that have kept me from using XML as a page template system.

Peter Henzler

Some people find JDOM to simplified. But that is what I really like with it. I can simply build my XML-files with clear Java code instead of dealing with all the various org.w3c.dom implementations where you never know if you got an interface or a class and how to build a simple element ;-) Good work.

Shelby Sanders

I want to thank you for the API. It is something that I would have ended up building, in order to avoid the hassle of SAX, JAXP, etc.

Nimret Sandhu

Let me say that of all the technologies that I have played with for messing with XML (DOM, SAX and DXML), this is the easiest one I have ever used.

Ryan Shriver

I must say that JDOM is one of the slickest tools I've seen in a while an your SQLBuilder is such a nice addition.

Tracy Robinson

I think you guys have come up with the cleanest abstraction for XML in Java that I have seen so far. I am really eager to see it become more prominent.

Nate Zelnick (Reporting for http://www.internetworldnews.com)

XML, simmering away for three years, has hit full boil and the slow build up has duplicated an all-too-typical problem: half-decent attempts to make a basic technology usable have quickly become the basis for production systems. So Thursday's announced Java Document Object Model (JDOM) -- an open-source project that makes XML available as a Java data type using Java language constructs -- is great news.

James Todd

Thanks for the pointers. I haven't yet had a chance to dive down to the supporting docs but will do so soon now that we've committed to JDOM ... and happily so I might add. This API is !fresh! after wading through miscellaneous xml api hell.

Michael Champion (Member of the W3C's DOM Working Group and Senior R&D Advisor, Software AG) as said on the xml-dev mailing list

The world can alway vote with its feet and override the votes of any standards committee. If the XML family of technologies do indeed prove too obfuscated for the needs of industry, we can expect "YML" or "ZML" or whatever to come along and rectify the mistakes that we refuse to face up to. We've seen Java get a lot of acceptance by addressing the "mistakes" in C++, and we see C# trying to address the "mistakes" in Java. We already see JDOM addressing the "mistakes" of the DOM, RELAX addressing the "mistakes" of XSD, etc. The marketplace of money and ideas, not the W3C or ISO, will ultimately decide which specs prevail.

Johan List

I tried JDOM yesterday (including the preliminary XPath stuff which has now been started) and I have to say that it makes life (well, maybe not all aspects of life....:) a lot easier.