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Java to XML and Back Again with Castor XML
by Alexander Prohorenko and Olexiy Prohorenko
The market has a lot of tools for combining Java with XML. Even Sun jumped on the bandwagon, introducing JAXB (Java Architecture for XML Binding), which since October 2004, has been included in the Java Web Services Developer Pack (JWSDP). This tool is still being actively developed—at time of writing, JAXB 2.0 Early Access 3 is already available.
Another popular framework is The Castor Project. This open source data binding framework claims to be "the shortest path between Java objects, XML documents, and relational tables." It provides Java-to-XML binding and Java-to-SQL persistence. There's been alot written about JAXB, despite the fact that Castor is supposed to be more flexible and a bit more powerful. Despite of the fact that I do not share this opinion, I still believe it's a great tool.
This article uses Castor to illustrate the basic steps between Java class transformation to XML and back again. This is a relatively simple task so the code won't be complicated at all.
You'll basically be writing a sample Java POJO class and an accompanying testing application, which will transform POJO into XML (marshallize) and then restore it back (unmarshallize).
Requirements
While you don't need any special knowledge to understand and run everything described here, you will need to have some hands-on experience with developing Java applications.
You will need only the Castor framework to build the code:
Keep in mind that you will need to have the library itself and any dependencies it may require:
You will use Ant for building and running:
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