Hi Ivelin From: "Ivelin Ivanov" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Is there a rundown available on the reasons why Betwix is developing in > paralel with JAXB?
Good question :-) > I've used Castor for quite some time and have been happy with its > performance. JAXB takes the approach that a DTD (and one day an XML schema) is used to generate beans that can parse/output the XML, then you can derive from them to add behaviour. Betwixt takes a different approach, that starting with any bean, it already has a default XML representation; then betwixt can be customized with just the differences you want (moving elements around, adding arbitrary extra XML nestings, renaming elements/attributes etc). Then betwixt can parse XML (using Digester, it essentially defaults digester rules) or output XML straight away, then customize to make it esthetically nicer XML later. On the list of things planned are SAX reader/writers and a DOM implementation using betwixt's mappings, then XSLT can be used on beans (like the Maven project does). Also I should finally get around to using Betwixt to add a bean Navigator to the Jaxen XPath engine. Betwixt essentially mirrors the Introspector / BeanInfo classes from java.beans but for mapping information of beans to XML, so there's an XMLIntrospector and XMLBeanInfo etc. Both the JAXB & betwixt approaches are equally valid; JAXB is useful if you want some beans generated from some kind of XML 'schema', betwixt is better if you already have the beans and want to customize what the XML looks like, or to automatically default digester rules for you, then maybe customize things later. So if you're starting from beans and want nice XML then betwixt is a good tool for the job; if you're starting with a DTD and want to write some beans, then look at JAXB. Castor is kinda in the middle between them with a bit more complexity thrown in for good measure but its got some good stuff in there. Though I always get the impression Castor is trying to do too much together at the same time rather than just doing one thing well, but maybe thats just me. I can't help think of the phrase 'jack of all trades and master of none'. e.g. Castor is JDO-like without being compliant, its kind of an O/R mapping tool, its a reasonable O/XML mapping tool and a kinda OQL engine all thrown in together. An impressive body of work though. As an aside, betwixt focusses on the mapping metadata of how beans should map to XML, so betwixt could maybe be used to generate Castor java <-> XML bindings - though I'm not sure why you'd want to do that ;-) > Apache Axis build their own JavaBean-XML mapping and Betwix is yet another > development in the area. Its on my list to investigate using Betwixt in Axis. SOAP supports various different encodings, 1 of which (usually called the 'soap encoding') is a well defined mapping of SOAP to java objects, so Axis probably implements that spec. However for some of the other encodings (such as none where you just get XML), then maybe betwixt could be used to map a SOAP schema to some implementation beans. i.e. to have a flexible, customizable mapping. I'd certainly like try out a Betwixt based serializer/deserializer for Axis and see if it works neatly. James _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
