Java and XML Data Binding shows you how to put the new XML data binding APIs to work. XML is an excellent tool for representing data. Ultimately, though, it's not enough to represent data; we also need to work with it, and working directly with XML documents is awkward. You have to navigate through the document, working with XML constructs such as elements and attributes. Programming at this level is awakward and alien to many software developers. The XML data binding tools discussed in this book allow you to jump directly from an XML document to Java objects and back again. Once you're in Java, you can work with your objects simply and intuitively in business-specific ways. Instead of finding and modifying the name attribute of an employee element, you can just call employee.setName(). Generating XML output is as simple as writing a file. With data binding, you can finally work in Java, rather than in XML.

This new book explains what data binding is, and then covers all the popular data binding toolkits: Sun's JAXB API, as well as three open source alternatives — Zeus, Castor, and Quick. Along the way, the book gives you lots of practical information about how to use data binding effectively: what pitfalls to avoid, where to bend the rules, and how to make the various packages do what you want them to do. XML is becoming a larger part of application development every day, and thousands of developers are struggling to understand the various XML constructs and Java APIs that manipulate them. However, instead of having to learn an entirely new way of thinking, using data binding provides you with XML data in a Java format; data-centric information in a business-centric manner; and difficult semantics in well-understood, Java-based terms. Moving between XML and Java (and back again) becomes trivial, and you'll soon forget that you are even dealing with XML data. If you want to use XML productively without spending months trying to grasp entity references and ignorable whitespace, then Java and XML Data Binding is the book for you.