Recently Natan Sweet the author of the YamlBeans library left a comment on the wiki page in SnakeYAML stating that the library comparison is very poor. Indeed I am biased and I may not have precise and up-to-date information. We shall try to create a non-biased version of such a comparison table taking all the arguments into account. I hope together with Natan we can deliver a better version.

In the mean time I try to clarify some of my statements.

1. I clearly state where I see that YamlBeans does not follow the specification. When I tried YamlBeans some time ago it trimmed trailing spaces from scalars in literal style. May it has been fixed in the meantime. I may check it.
2. How can YamlBeans prove it works with Java 5 if it cannot be built with Java 5? How I can be sure that no Java 6 methods are called ?
3. Indeed I made a mistake stating that line number is not reported in case of an error. I overlooked it because it is sometimes shown as part of another exception deep in the stack trace. SnakeYAML together with line number shows some error context - a couple of lines of the YAML document to clearly identify the problem.
4. The quality of the YamlBeans parser is indeed higher then the one from JvYaml. YamlBeans is not mentioned next to JvYaml's bugs anymore. I am sorry.
5. By "Low level API" I understand the agreed way to get the low details of the underlying YAML document. It means that this API must expose Nodes and Events which part of the specification. Of course YamlBeans has some low-level details. Are they described anywhere ? Can they be used ? For instance, recently JRuby began to use SnakeYAML because its low-level API is fully compatible with the standard Ruby parser.
6. The fact that something can be done does not mean it is done. It took a reasonable amount of time and efforts to deploy SnakeYAML artifacts into a public repository. YamlBeans has not finished the task yet. When you use Maven then the source is automatically downloaded and added to your project in Eclipse by maven script. This is very convenient.

In the meantime I have created a few issues for YamlBeans to show my points. I think it is better discuss it one-by-one to avoid any misunderstanding in the future.

Once I have time I will try to prepare another version of the comparison table and before I publish it I will get in touch with Natan to avoid mistakes.