This post should probably be titled “Why I don’t like Unmarhsalling frameworks”. They just hack me off. I mean really, who wants to have to use the Java objects that they make you use? It’s not that they don’t represent as objects the data that the frameworks unmarshall, they do. It’s more that the underlying data may or may not match your systems view of the domain. I don’t want to have to run some process to generate Foo.java only to convert it to MyFoo.java, I’d rather go straight to MyFoo.

I was using Castor to do the former some time ago. It sounded like a good idea, and I got going really quickly. However, I quickly didn’t like the objects its produced so had to modify the mapping.xml to “tailor” the marshalling. Still fine, this was ok for a while but soon enough I descended into a kind of Castor mapping hell. I seriously spent days trying to tweak things and had to compromise the model in the end.

After some reflection, I thought I’d try and dump Castor. I replaced the marshalling with merging to a Freemarker template and produced cleaner XML in under an hour. The unmarshalling, replaced with manually parsing the XML and inserting elements directly into objects. I couldn’t believe how much less pain I was feeling.

For me, the overhead of maintaining these more “manual” approaches is far less than working around any framework mismatches. If you’re lucky enough to find a marhsalling framework that can grow with you, fair play, but I’m heavily biased towards a more manual approach these days. Down with [insert framework here].