Special Edition Using Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition

The Need For Additional Tools

So far, you can read and write XML files and use XSL to translate an XML file from one form to another. You can go a long way with just these capabilities, but there are many more tools out there that solve common problems as well. Tools that automatically copy data from Java objects to XML and from XML to Java are extremely useful. DOM might give you a representation of the data in the XML file, but as a developer, you're better off working with objects that represent the data. In other words, it's better to work with a Person object than it is to work with a DOM Element whose tag name is Person.

There are two basic philosophies when it comes to automatically translating between XML and Java, and the difference ...