astradele

I heard about JAXB from a coworker. When I first read about it, I thought it was a fascinating tool to abstract all the tedious composing and decomposing of XML documents. JAXB builds Java interfaces/classes based on an XML Schema, and handles convert between Java objects and XML documents.

From what I can tell so far, JAXB doesn’t handle extending complex types that well. For some reason, when I write complex types like this: and marshal it using the JAXB generated marhsallers, the generated document only has the Child’s properties, rather than Base+Child. So when it’s fed back through the schema, it’s wrong!

Reading the JAXB docs more thorougly, they seem to say that extensions aren’t wholly supported, but extensions for complex types are okay (yay!). On the other hand, as I tried to follow the instructions to enable it, it got increasingly burdensome the number of hoops I was jumping through just to use JAXB.

So I need to pause and consider for a moment: does JAXB still provide me with value, or is it as much work to get it working as to go it on my own? I don’t want to do custom development, but I can’t seem to get what I want: generate an object model that lets me work naturally in Java, and converts it to and from simple XML (no namespaces, etc.) to send over the wire. I feel like the JAXB implementors had a more lofty and complex goal than mine – probably handling the full XML Schema spec.