Hi David,
I have a couple of thoughts about the DataFormat class I wanted to bounce off of you.
The first is exceptions. What do you think about having the methods throw IOException. The rationale being that these methods will be doing I/O, writing and reading from streams, etc...
The second is proving the methods with the restlet request and response objects. The rationale here being that there might be additional information that is needed to influence the output that might not be readily available in the object itself. I am thinking the regular format_options type stuff here...
-Justin
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Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.