Dmitry Serebrennikov's List: XML for Object Externalization

• Developers familiar with the Simple API for XML Parsing (SAX) approach to processing XML documents will recognize that the Digester provides a higher level, more developer-friendly interface to SAX events, because most of the details of navigating the XML element hierarchy are hidden -- allowing the developer to focus on the processing to be performed.

• The Betwixt library provides an XML introspection mechanism  for mapping beans to XML in a flexible way. It is implemented using an   XMLIntrospector and XMLBeanInfo classes which are similar to the standard   Introspector and BeanInfo from the Java Beans specification.

   

    Betwixt provides a way of turning beans into XML as well as automatically   generating digester rules in a way that can be customized on a per type   manner in the same way that the BeanInfo mechanism can be used to customize   the default introspection on a java object.

• Smooks works by converting a stream of structured/hierarchical data into a stream of "events" that can then be targeted with "Visitor Logic" for analysis, or to produce a result (optional).
• Create and populate Java Object models/graphs from any of the supported data formats (i.e. not just XML), in a standard way. 
• Smooks can be effectively used to populate Java Object models from any supported source data format. 

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• Ease of configuration.   Spring's bean factory makes it easy to configure marshallers, without needing to construct JAXB context,  JiBX binding factories, etc. The marshallers can be configured as any other bean in your application  context. Additionally, XML Schema-based configuration is available for a number of marshallers, making  the configuration even simpler. 

  Consistent Interfaces.   Spring's O/X mapping operates through two global interfaces: the   Marshaller and Unmarshaller interface.   These abstractions allow you to switch O/X mapping   frameworks with relative ease, with little or no changes required on the classes that do the   marshalling. This approach has the additional benefit of making it possible to do XML marshalling with   a mix-and-match approach (e.g. some marshalling performed using JAXB, other using XMLBeans) in a   non-intrusive fashion, leveraging the strength of each technology. 

  Consistent Exception Hierarchy.   Spring provides a conversion from exceptions from the underlying O/X mapping tool to its own exception  hierarchy with the XmlMappingException as the root exception. As can be expected,  these runtime exceptions wrap the original exception so no information is lost. 

• <oxm:jaxb2-marshaller id="marshaller" contextPath="org.springframework.ws.samples.airline.schema"/>

  • Example
• The JAXB binding compiler translates a W3C XML Schema into one or more Java classes, a   jaxb.properties file, and possibly other files, depending on the specific  implementation of JAXB. Alternatively, JAXB2 offers a way to generate a schema from annotated Java classes.
• Castor XML mapping is an open source XML binding framework. It allows you to transform the data contained in  a java object model into/from an XML document. By default, it does not require any further configuration,  though a mapping file can be used to have more control over the behavior of Castor.

• XMLBeans is an XML binding tool that has full XML Schema support, and offers full XML Infoset  fidelity. It takes a different approach to that of most other O/X mapping frameworks, in that  all classes that are generated from an XML Schema are all derived from  XmlObject, and contain XML binding information in them. 

    For more information on XMLBeans, refer to the   XMLBeans web site .

• The JiBX framework offers a solution similar to that which JDO provides for ORM: a binding definition defines the  rules for how your Java objects are converted to or from XML. After preparing the binding and compiling the  classes, a JiBX binding compiler enhances the class files, and adds code to handle converting instances of  the classes from or to XML. 

    For more information on JiBX, refer to the   JiBX web site.
• XStream is a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again. It does not require any mapping, and  generates clean XML.

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• JXPath