A new request has been submitted to the Java Community Process called XML Data Binding.

The only existing Java APIs for manipulating XML are the low-level SAX parser API and the somewhat higher-level DOM parse-tree API. While it is possible to write XML-enabled programs using these interfaces, doing so is likely to be tedious and error-prone. The resulting code is also likely to contain many redundancies that will make it difficult to maintain as bugs are fixed and as the relevant schemas evolve.

The proposed specification will vastly simplify the creation and maintenance of XML-enabled Java programs. Data binding automatically maps the components of an XML document to in-memory objects that represent, in an obvious and useful way, the document's intended meaning according to its schema. This allows Java programs that manipulate XML content to be written at the same conceptual level as the content itself, rather than at the level of parser events or parse trees.