BEA’s dev2dev site has an article titled XML Beans: The Best of Both Worlds on their cover page. XMLBeans is a pretty interesting technology from BEA that provides easy navigation of XML data using cursors or XQuery statements. In addition, Java classes representing the XML document is automatically generated based on the XML Schema provided. These generated Java classes enable easy read/write access to XML information and enforce XML Schema constraints. Pretty neat idea and it’s fast. And the support for XML Schema is pretty nice.

This brings up an issue as Sun has been pushing JAXB as the standard API/tool that automates the mapping between XML documents and Java objects. Will these 2 products directly compete or will BEA support JAXB completely in their product line? BEA has typically had a really good record of supporting and leading the charge on creation of new standards via. the JCP. Hitesh Seth, the author talks about it in his article and I second his hope that these initiatives converge at some point. ok.. Now back to Hibernate 🙂