--- On Mon, 2/16/09, Paul Sandoz <Paul.Sandoz_at_Sun.COM> wrote:
...
> Potentially there are some advantages. JAXB has some
> interesting ways of extending the binding of data types.
> Character data as well as structure can be validated. It
> should also be possible to support a general filtering
> approach in an abstract fashion based on the StAX API (a
> developer has added a patch to do just that).
True: it's just that fundamentally it is closely bound to xml.
And I wish there was something that wasn't. There are many aspects to data binding that are not strongly bound to the data format.
So I like many things in JAXB per se; but the baggage of xml compatiblity (including using stax API which likewise is not a good match with json) is the problem.
...
> > Conceptually that is the case already; types accepted
> > and returned are annotated, without need for directly
> > referencing machinery that does conversions.
>
> If i understand you correctly then we may have what you
> require: JAX-RS message body readers/writers.
That could well be true. :-)
I wish I had more time to play with Jersey, I am sure I am missing useful facilities that would make life easier.
...
> But may be for the case JAXB-related types it needs some
> finessing if you want to plug in an alternative JSON-based
> convention that does not go through the JAXB infrastructure
> but wants to use the same types i.e. we would like to ensure
> that JSON plays nice with JAXB or not depending on what
> convention you choose, in addition to the case when those
> types are not associated with JAXB annotations but still
> require support for JSON.
In a way my point is that there should be no need to play nicely with JAXB types: JAXB can be used with Objects<->XML conversion, and something else for Object<->Json; or, Object<->hessian and so on.
Perhaps that's to be handled with body handlers?
> > At this point this is just wishful thinking; with 1.x
> release it's not possible to change core API
> depedencies. But maybe for 2.0? ;-)
> >
>
> :-) would you be interested in helping out?
Sure. I think Jersey (and JAX-RS) has enough promise to make it worthwhile to follow, use and maybe help with if I can.
-+ Tatu +-