The ‘object-relational impedance mismatch’ is a well documented set of conceptual and technical difficulties that are often encountered when a relational database management system is being used by a program written in an object-oriented programming language. A similar impedance mismatch exists when XML is used by a program written in an object-oriented programming language.

Many popular ‘Object-Relational Mapping’ (ORM) frameworks exist that address the object-relational impedance mismatch and no doubt helped to inspire the evolution of ‘Object-XML Mapping’ (OXM) frameworks to address the object-xml impedance mismatch.

For the Java community, there are a number of OXM frameworks from which to choose (Castor, XStream, JiBX, JAXB) with each having particular strengths and weaknesses. The standard OXM framework for Java is JAXB.

In the following I work through a simple example that demonstrates object to XML marshalling (and demarshalling) using Spring, Spring WS and JAXB (and later JAXB Introductions!)

I have provided Maven projects for download so you can follow along:

Spring OXM and JAXB Source Download
Spring OXM, JAXB and JAXB Introductions Download
» Read more: Marshalling XML with Spring WS and JAXB