News

XML Beans: Where Java meets data

• By Rich Seeley
• August 6, 2003

''XML Beans solves a very significant impedance mismatch problem that exists between the world of Java and the world of XML,'' said Frank Martinez. Martinez is chairman and chief technology officer at San Francisco-based Blue Titan Software Inc., a company that has worked closely with BEA Systems Inc., the developer of XML Beans technology.

''Java is object-oriented and XML is obviously not -- it is data-oriented and hierarchical,'' he said.

Problems arise when Web services developers, working with the J2EE platform, begin with an XML schema only to find that at the end of the project the schema and their final WSDL don't match, Martinez explained. Most available Java tools start with an object-oriented approach and work down to the data, losing some of the benefits of XML along the way, he asserted.

''With XML Beans,'' Martinez said, ''you start off with your data and you go from data to schema. From schema, you go upstream toward your implementation. It solves this significant impedance mismatch problem between XML and Java, and delivers 100% fidelity in terms of the representation of your schema to your Web service and components. And that's a big deal.''

XML Beans is currently ''under the hood'' of BEA's WebLogic Workshop and is used by Blue Titan's Web services networking product which is integrated with BEA WebLogic Platform 8.1, Martinez said.

XML Beans is expected to come out from under the hood and be made publicly available, perhaps through the Java Community Process, he noted.