Java API for XML Binding (JAXB) is the much-anticipated Java API designed to provide a programmatic association between XML and Java. Like much of the other JAX APIs, JAXB is designed to provide an abstraction layer at the Java code level, insulating developers from dealing with building, reading, and processing the underlying XML constructs. In general, binding provides developers with a programming-language-centric view of the underlying XML. Though binding developers deal only with objects and classes in their Java code, these objects and classes correspond to underlying XML constructs.
At the time of writing this book, the JAXB specifications were public draft version 0.75 and Reference Implementation 1.0. We do not anticipate significant changes between these and the FCS.
In Chapter 9, we introduced the concept of parsing XML using SAX and DOM. However, we also mentioned that this would not be necessary, because developers will work with JAXB. Let us now expand on this.
The traditional design approach when dealing with XML in application code has centered around retrieval and parsing of XML, using XML parsers and API (such as JAXP and SAX/DOM) and manipulating the result of that parsing exercise. For example, with SAX, developers run though an XML file in a serial manner, access data, and use its programmatic representation their own Java objects. Alternatively, developers parse the XML using a tree-based approach and create object tree representations in memory, using a model defined by some other party (e.g., the W3C DOM)...
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