"standard" does not mean "good"... Use the solution which best meets your needs. You might also want to look at "castor" http://www.castor.org . Last I saw it's collection support (particularly for maps) was a bit lacking, but it's got excellent support for simple beans, and hierarchal beans, even to the point of using reflection to read and write your beans if you don't supply a mapping.
You might also want to look into XMLEncoder and XMLDecoder supplied with JDK 1.4. They're good for simple bean i/o. There's no support for mappings, and the xml produced is a bit cryptic if you don't know what you're doing. ie...Not exactly user friendly. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <java version="1.0" class="java.beans.XMLDecoder"> <object class="javax.swing.JFrame"> <void property="name"> <string>frame1</string> </void> <void property="bounds"> <object class="java.awt.Rectangle"> <int>0</int> <int>0</int> <int>200</int> <int>200</int> </object> </void> <void property="contentPane"> <void method="add"> <object class="javax.swing.JButton"> <void property="label"> <string>Hello</string> </void> </object> </void> </void> <void property="visible"> <boolean>true</boolean> </void> </object> </java> -----Original Message----- From: Samuel Cheung [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 5:15 PM To: 'Jakarta Commons Developers List' Subject: [digester] Digester vs xmlbean vs JAXB I have a newbie question. What are the advantages/dis-advantages between Digester vs xmlbean vs JAXB? My understanding is they convert XML file to Java Class. Is that correct? If that is the case, shouldn't one use JAXB over xmlbean and Digester, since JAXB is "standard"? Thanks for any feedback.