This week I had to implement a small Java program that would provide a UI to manipulate an XML file. My heart sank a bit at the promise of a trip to the Java/XML enterprise heartland.

My original plan was to just implement a minimal, viable subset of the XML as a proof of concept – and since this is, it self, for a proof of concept, I might well have gotten away with it. But still, anything that worth doing is worth doing well, so I did some research (which is a nice way of saying that I dithered for a while, trying to make up my mind) and happened to notice that JAXB was already on the classpath of the project.

JAXB – Java Architecture for XML Binding – works by taking a XSD schema and generating bindings for it. I recalled the similar approach used in JAX-WS and cringed, but resolved to give it a shot. I have some previous experience building XSDs and find it a reasonably sane and helpful exercise: it forces you to consider your XML format separately. It has some counter-intuitive constraints (an element can’t contain a mix of element types and children in any order, they must come in a certain order) but nothing too outrageous.

Having build the XSD, I fed it to the ‘xjc’ command line util, helpfully included in the JDK, and got a nicely generated set of classes with binding to my XML format. The link above is to a “Hello World” sample, and I don’t think I can improve much on that – thus, no sample code in this post.

It worked almost as expected – after battling a bit with the interface to the JAXB unmarshaller, I discovered that about half the problems I was facing was due to my XSD not defining a root element. This has the effect of declaring a universe in which the element can exist, not telling JAXB explicitly to expect a certain element in my XML file.

With that fixed, I had a nice and clean typesafe interface to my XML format that turned out to work exactly as expected. Dynamic languages have a lot going for them in this domain, but I really like that I have autocompletion directly into my XML format and if I change the format, I can re-generate the bindings and get a nice list of compiler errors to work from.