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Friday, November 16, 2007

Data Binding With Castor, Part 1

The Castor project provides data binding capabilities to the open source
realm. It works much like Sun's JAXB, and adds enhanced mapping and
binding to relational database tables. This article shows how to take
the first steps to get Castor to run on your own machine with downloading,
installation, setup, configuration, class path issues, and more. Castor
is an almost-drop-in replacement for JAXB. In other words, you can change
all of your JAXB code to Castor with very little trouble. It's not an
exact replacement, but it's close enough to make the task simple for
even newbie programmers. Castor offers quite a bit more in the data
binding area, allows you to convert between Java and XML without a schema,
an easier-to-use binding schema than JAXB, and the ability to marshal and
unmarshal from a relational database, as well as XML documents. Castor
also provides JDO capabilities. JDO stands for Java Data Objects, and
it's the underlying technology that drives the Java-to-RDBMS marshalling
and unmarshalling. JDO isn't quite as popular as it was a few years ago,
but it's still a nice feature to have. Additionally, because JDO is
another Sun specification, you won't write code to an obscure API.

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