Allow me to enumerate the many ways I hate JAXB. JAXB is an XML data binding tool for Java; that is, it generates code to make using XML more Java-like. This is great in concept. In reality it is not so great:
- Two days away from your project due date, JAXB lets you know that it isn’t mindful of the method size limits in the JVM. Javac tells you: “code too large.”
- There’s a limit to method sizes in the JVM?
- Upon examining a generated class, you discover 25k lines of utter garbage. Things like the same if-then clause being repeated twice in a row.
- Turning off generation of the validator, or the unmarshaller, or the validating unmarshaller does have the effect of reducing code size, at a cost of generating code that doesn’t compile.
- Or if it compiles, it throws a runtime exception when you use it.
- The object hierarchy is all screwed up, such that a concrete implementation type may implement a (JAXB internal) interface that is not also implemented by the corresponding abstract interface (the two are supposed to be interchangeable).
- You have to do naughty proprietary things to make type substitution work.
- Creates a new namespace prefix for practically every element even though I only use 3 namespaces in the entire document.
I only just learned about XMLBeans. Dammit.
