[jdom-interest] jdk1.4 replacing JDOM with "XML Binding"?

[Martin Bravenboer]

Hey,

> I have read that the JDK 1.4 has "A new XML Binding mechanism that could
> replace JDOM" An article entitled "Merlin to make its appearance" in
> "JavaReport" (June edition page 9) mentions this.

Maybe they're talking about the Java Architecture for XML Binding. This
product creates a parser + Java objects from document type definition.
http://java.sun.com/xml/jaxb/index.html

As far as I know JAXB will not be included in JDK 1.4. The early access
release is in fact very unmature. Also JAXB currently only accepts DTD, not
XML Schema. The generated Java code is not very easy to use and is the XML
binding schema is not very customizable. Therefore it's almost necessary to
create a wrapper around the JAXB generated code.

JAXB is quite different from JDOM. JDOM has a generic class structure to
represent a XML file in Java objects. JAXB creates a dedicated class
structure for each DTD. It's completely impossible to handle unknow content
(or 'any content' in XML Schema) in JAXB.

JDOM is also accepted as JSR ( http://jcp.org/jsr/detail/102.jsp )

Greetz,
Martin