...and JiBX shall reign supreme

There are a lot of choices out there when it comes to XML data binding tools. JAXB, XMLBeans, Castor, JiBX and Xstream are a few that come to mind. I’ve used quite a few of these tools and I like different ones for different reasons. I’m a big fan of tools that focus on doing one thing really well. Serializing and deserializing XML seems like a problem space that is about the right size for such a tool but for some reason none of the technologies I’ve worked with in this area have been able to meet all of my needs.

JiBX is one such tool that comes as close as any that I’ve worked with to being the silver bullet for XML marshalling. For a few years now JiBX has been my marshalling tool of choice when I need to deserialize a lot of XML because it offers the best performance I’ve seen by far. However, this performance has always come at the cost of having to deal with running an XML binding compiler that embeds the binding code directly into your existing class files. This can put a hitch in your development giddy up because you have to run this binding compiler every time you change one of the classes that gets marshalled/unmarshalled. JiBX does support limited runtime binding for development but it is very limited - it’s not designed to work in a servlet engine or app server. That means the vast majority of us who work with web apps will find ourselves restarting our server every time we change a JiBX-aware class and forget to run the binding compiler. The small pain of having to re-run the binding compiler or re-start your server when you forget to run it is one of those annoying little issues that has a cumulative negative effect over the life of a project that is easy to underestimate. Because of this, JiBX has always left a little something to be desired for me and if performance isn’t an issue I opt for something that doesn’t require the extra step.

All of that changed a couple of weeks ago when I was browsing the JiBX documentation hoping that perhaps this last hurdle had been leaped. To my delight I found that it had. There is now an Eclipse plug-in that detects changes to the classes referenced by your JiBX binding definition and re-compiles the binding automatically. The only downside to this discovery is that I didn’t make it sooner; the plug-in has been available since late May of last year. Unfortunately this isn’t the type of advancement that gets a lot of publicity, you have to get annoyed enough to go looking for it. Although it’s a relatively small feature it is a really satisfying addition that adds a lot of value in my opinion. I’ve always found it a little frustrating that none of the XML marshalling tools I’ve worked with were quite good enough to become my de facto standard. By removing this last chink in the armor I can now say JiBX has claimed that title.