Trang and XMLBeans are totally cool


Have you ever had a bunch of XML documents and wish you had Java objects? Now you can!

These two tools work together so well that they should be integrated into one wonderful package. Just recently, as I was trying to rid myself of all references to WebLogic in a personal project, I used them for about the fifth time in concert. As a side note, most utilities for building enterprise applications can be found in various WebLogic packages, including weblogic.utils, weblogic.xml and weblogic.servlet.internal, too bad they aren't public. I found this out the hard way and have been scrambling for replacements. While stripping out a dependency on the WLS StaX implementation, I decided to get rid of all the direct XML code for reading and writing configuration files. So I had a collection of config files and a bunch of custom code for reading and writing them. First I erased all that code. What a waste of brain power that was. Next I downloaded Trang and ran it against all of the config files that I was using as test cases for the old system to produce an schema (xsd). If I had had good code coverage I wouldn't have needed to edit the files, but unfortunately, there were some things that I missed. So I fixed up the schema a bit and ran it through XMLBeans 1.0.3 to produce a .jar file of classes that I could use to read and write the configuration files.

That was almost it. After converting the application to use the new config file system I did go back and refactor the schema a bit to add some abstraction. I wonder when the IDEs will be able to do that themselves?

Posted: Mon - October 4, 2004 at 10:59 PM           |

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