What is the best way to convert a java object to xml with open source apis

Question

Hi,

I was wondering what the best or most widely used apis are to convert a java object to xml. I'm fairly new on the subject. Is there some sort of api call you can make to pass in an object and return xml? Or is it much more tedious where as you need to construct the document manually by pulling out object values?

I have been reading about xerces, sax, and jaxb. I would like to continue along this open source route.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You might look at xstream: http://xstream.codehaus.org/

Answer 2

JAXB is definitely the solution.

Why? Well, it's inside the JDK 6, so you'll never find it unmaintained.

It uses Java annotations to declare XML-related properties for classes, methods and fields.

Tutorial 1

Tutorial 2

Note: JAXB also enables you to easily 'unmarshal' XML data (which was previously marshalled from Java object instances) back to object instances.

One more great thing about JAXB is: It is supported by other Java-related technologies, such as JAX-RS (a Java RESTful API, will be availible as part of Java EE 6 in one year or so). JAX-RS can serve and receive JAXB objects on the fly, without the need of marshalling/unmarshalling them. You might want to check out Netbeans, which contains out-of-the-box support for JAX-RS. Read this tutorial for getting started.

edit:

To marshall/unmarshall 'random' (or foreign) Java objects, JAXB offers fairly simple possibility: One can declare an XmlAdapter and 'wrap' existing Java classes to be JAXB-compatible. Usage of such XmlAdapter is done by using the @XmlJavaTypeAdapter-annotation.

Answer 3

What about java.beans.XMLEncoder and java.beans.XMLDecoder ?

Example at http://www.rgagnon.com/javadetails/java-0470.html

Bye.

Answer 4

XMLBeans is another one, similar to JAXB. I haven't looked at JAXB in a while, when I did it was fairly bad compared to XMLBeans, but that was years ago (and I prefer to use things that are in the JDK as opposed to 3rd party ones, but I still use XMLBeans to this day).

Answer 5

I have found Simple very easy to use.

Answer 6

There are many open source frameworks in this space. However, Simple as its name suggests, is by far the easiest way to perform serialization. Take a look at the Tutorial. Another feature is that it can perform polymorphic serialization, which means its not as constrained as JAXB for example.

Answer 7

Available with Java 6 is an API to convert annotated Java Objects to XML. The following code shows how to convert an annotated object to an XML string

final JAXBElement<Type> o = new ObjectFactory().createElement(new Type());

final Marshaller m = JAXBContext.newInstance(Type.class).createMarshaller();

// Do this if you want the result to be more human readable.
m.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);
m.marshal(o, System.out);

You can further extend this by adding schema validation (note very slow, but useful for debugging)

final JAXBElement<Type> o = new ObjectFactory().createElement(new Type());

final Marshaller m = JAXBContext.newInstance(Type.class).createMarshaller();
final Schema schema = SchemaFactory.newInstance(
  "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema").newSchema(
  getClass().getResource("/META-INF/wsdl/schema.xsd"));
m.setSchema(schema);
m.marshal(o, System.out);

You don't need to do a type conversion to JAXBElement if Type is a defined element. (i.e. has an annotation @XmlRootElement)