In this chapter, we will describe Spring's Object/XML Mapping support. Object/XML Mapping, or O/X mapping for short, is the act of converting an XML document to and from an object. This conversion process is also known as XML Marshalling, or XML Serialization. This chapter uses these terms interchangeably.

Within the field of O/X mapping, a marshaller is responsible for serializing an object (graph) to XML. In similar fashion, an unmarshaller deserializes the XML to an object graph. This XML can take the form of a DOM document, an input or output stream, or a SAX handler.

Some of the benefits of using Spring for your O/X mapping needs are:

Ease of configuration.  Spring's bean factory makes it easy to configure marshallers, without needing to construct JAXB context, JiBX binding factories, etc. The marshallers can be configured as any other bean in your application context. Additionally, XML Schema-based configuration is available for a number of marshallers, making the configuration even simpler.

Consistent Interfaces.  Spring's O/X mapping operates through two global interfaces: the Marshaller and Unmarshaller interface. These abstractions allow you to switch O/X mapping frameworks with relative ease, with little or no changes required on the classes that do the marshalling. This approach has the additional benefit of making it possible to do XML marshalling with a mix-and-match approach (e.g. some marshalling performed using JAXB, other using XMLBeans) in a non-intrusive fashion, leveraging the strength of each technology.

Consistent Exception Hierarchy.  Spring provides a conversion from exceptions from the underlying O/X mapping tool to its own exception hierarchy with the XmlMappingException as the root exception. As can be expected, these runtime exceptions wrap the original exception so no information is lost.