Java and XML Data Binding shows you how to put the new XML data binding APIs to work. XML is an excellent tool for representing data. Ultimately, though, its not enough to represent data; we also need to work with it, and working directly with XML documents is awkward. You have to navigate through the document, working with XML constructs such as elements and attributes. Programming at this level is awakward and alien to many software developers. The XML data binding tools discussed in this book allow you to jump directly from an XML document to Java objects and back again. Once youre in Java, you can work with your objects simply and intuitively in business-specific ways. Instead of finding and modifying the name attribute of an employee element, you can just call employee.setName(). Generating XML output is as simple as writing a file. With data binding, you can finally work in Java, rather than in XML. This new book explains what data binding is, and then covers all the popular data binding toolkits: Suns JAXB API, as well as three open source alternatives -- Zeus, Castor, and Quick. Along the way, the book gives you lots of practical information about how to use data binding effectively: what pitfalls to avoid, where to bend the rules, and how to make the various packages do what you want them to do. XML is becoming a larger part of application development every day, and thousands of developers are struggling to understand the various XML constructs and Java APIs that manipulate them. However, instead of having to learn an entirely new way of thinking, using data binding provides you with XML data in a Java format; data-centric information in a business-centric manner; and difficult semantics in well-understood, Java-based terms. Moving between XML and Java (and back again) becomes trivial, and youll soon forget that you are even dealing with XML data. If you want to use XML productively without spending months trying to grasp entity references and ignorable whitespace, then Java and XML Data Binding is the book for you. More Java developers today want to work with XML, the technology that enables data to be transported intact over the Internet, but they dont have time to become XML experts. If this describes you, then youll appreciate data binding, the new way of converting XML documents into Java objects, so those documents can be worked on and manipulated like any other Java object, then converted back to XML. This new title provides an in-depth technical look at XML Data Binding. The book offers complete documentation of all features in both the Sun Microsystems JAXB API and popular open source alternative implementations (Enhydra Zeus, Exolabs Castor and Quick). It also gets into significant detail about when data binding is appropriate to use, and provides numerous practical examples of using data binding in applications. As Author Brett McLaughlin says "Too many books are written about technologies by people who barely understand them. Ive already written two data binding implementations (Zeus, and a previous one for IBM DeveloperWorks.) Ive actually used data binding for longer than the official specification has been in existence, and Ive really been able to dig into what it takes to code an effective data biding implementation, as well as use one correctly. This book is part user guide, part under-the-hood manual, and part use-case. Its a powerful combination, and one I think people need."