XML & EJB: Spanning the Document - Object Divide

ABSTRACT

The Enterprise Java Bean model was not designed with the processing of XML in mind. There are some fundamental mismatches between a document view and an object view, and this presentation reviews them. It also reviews current approaches to generating objects from XML and vice versa, and identifies the drawbacks. It also reviews some of the emerging APIs intended to help Java programmers with processing XML, such as JAXM.

An attractive solution is to divide the application into a collaborative element, which is focused on processing documents, and an intra-application element, which handles inward facing application logic. An example of a primarily collaborative application would be an XML router. An example of a primarily inward facing application would be an accounting system. This presentation proposes a document driven, rule based processing model for the collaborative element integrated with EJB based applications.