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XMLBeans: the best of both worlds. (First Look).

Article Excerpt
"Java and XML--portable code and portable data." Even though this saying has been around since Java developers began using XML, developers have always faced a general XML programming-related productivity problem: manipulating XML content is rather different from manipulating Java objects.

This problem has been amplified with the emergence of XML Schema, the W3C standard type system for XML documents. While XML Schema provides a rich type system for XML documents, it isn't simple. Above all, the XML Schema type system differs significantly from the Java type system (e.g., the notion of simple types versus complex types, a rich set of predefined simple types. schema by restriction, etc.)

Several alternatives have already surfaced to solve some of these problems. For example, we have the tree-based Document Object Model (DOM), and the lower-level, events-based SAX (Simple API for XML), implemented by Apache Xerces, the almost de facto standard Java parser implementation. For Java programmers searching for a more natural object-oriented mechanism, there's the Java API for XML Binding (JAXB), which was recently released in its 1.0 specification. JAXB (covered in XML- Journal, Vol. 4, issue 1) intends to create a Java-XML binding framework that provides Java programmers with more natural object-oriented access to the underlying XML data. JAXB also supports XML Schema-based type...

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