BEA Systems has released a beta version of its free XML schema-to-Java class-mapping library and service. The service allows developers to bypass lower-level standard Java APIs for manipulating XML data and use a more object-oriented approach. Also different is that XMLBeans are based on XML Schema instead of Document Type Definition files. I submitted an XML Schema document to the BEA code generation side and could download a Java class file and interface source code a few moments later, customized to my schema file. XMLBeans classes require a Java 1.4 virtual machine.
The generated Java classes matched the strong data typing of XML Schema and provided get-and-set methods for each XML element or attribute. XQuery-based queries are supported to search XML data structures, and there are two navigation methods for moving through XML data: an array-based API and a cursor-based API.
The service is available at dev2dev.bea.com/technologies/xmlbeans/overview.jsp.