That is #2 on my list of baffling API ommisions, narrowly beaten by JAF's lack of an in-memory DataSource implementation. (google seems to back me up!).

Seems that Sun is a really big company, where left hand doesn't know what a right hand is doing :-)

At least in my copy of JAXP that comes as a part of JWSDP there is a file NamespaceContextImpl.java in jaxp/samples/XPath directory which provides basic implementation of this interface.

I can see some logic (though little bit perverse I must admit) behind structure of JAXP interfaces, but it seems that they were not designed for daily usage. Why JAXP doesn't support something like:

XPath xpath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
xpath.setPrefixMapping("db", "http://docbook.org/ns/docbook");

Actually it was only 3 hours ago, when I was pointing some developer to NamespaceContext implementation for a last time. ;-(

Do you think that in a future we can believe in a complete redesign of JAXP, or it will be only patched and upgraded to support new technlogies in a some way?

To be clear, I don't think that this is your fault, I'm just unhappy with JAXP and with default XML support in a Java platform. And I think that your NamespaceContext implementation will help to many developers (thought ability to do namespace aware XPaths without it, will be even better).

Lot of thanks for share this solution! It was usefull for me.

Worked well for me too. Thanks.

P.S. Thanks for providing the JUnit tests. Without them I could not include it in my source without ruining my code coverage. ;-)