For folks interested in using JDOM, but afraid that hasn't been updated in a while (especially not leveraging Java generics), there is a fork called CoffeeDOM which exactly addresses these aspects and modernizes the JDOM API, read more here:
http://cdmckay.org/blog/2011/05/20/introducing-coffeedom-a-jdom-fork-for-java-5/
and download it from the project page at:
https://github.com/cdmckay/coffeedom