Elliotte Rusty Harold (everyone’s favorite geek with three first names) just released his answer to Java XML APIs: XOM. I can’t help but laugh. Not because it’s not good, or not a good idea – at first glance, it looks very nice. I laugh because about ten years ago I was working with an API called XOM: the X/Open OSI-Abstract-Data Manipulation API.

Elliotte’s XOM certainly has a better acronym expansion: XML Object Model. Here’s hoping the API itself is as big an improvement over the original XOM.