JAXB for Hackystat for Dummies

I spent today working through the XML/Java conversion process for SensorBase resources, and it occurred to me near the end that my struggles could significantly shorten the learning curve for others writing higher level services that consume SensorBase data (such as the UI services being built by Alexey, Pavel, and David.)

So, I did a quick writeup on the approach, in which I refer to a library jar file I have made available as the first SensorBase download.

After so many years using JDOM, which was nice in its own way, it is great to move onward to an even faster, simpler, and easier approach.

Xml Schema definition for dummies

Today I defined my first batch of Xml Schemas for Version 8. The results of my labors are now available at http://hackystat-sensorbase-uh.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/xml/schema/

For each XSD file, I also provide a couple of "example" XML files, available in http://hackystat-sensorbase-uh.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/xml/examples/

To test that the XSD validates the XML, I used the online DecisionSoft Xml Validator. Provide it with an XSD schema definition file, and an XML file to validate against it, and away it goes. The error messages were a little obtuse, but good enough for my purposes.

It's possible to include a reference to the XSD file within the XML instance, which is probably what we want to do in practice.

The next step is to parse the XML. Here's a nice example of using JAXB 2.0 to parse XML efficiently (both in terms of code size and execution time).