Yes -- so you make one call to the method that does those several
things, rather than several calls to primitive methods.
"Helper Subroutines" (or methods, or macros, or what have you) are
a good idiom to use whenever you find yourself repeating code.
- Dave
p.s. Since at least some of that code was there to deal with an
issue much like prettyprinting, try grabbing the new release
of the library: http://java.sun.com/jdc/earlyAccess/xml