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Asked: 2026-05-20T22:49:31+00:00

I’ve been going over this in my head and trying out different approaches for

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I’ve been going over this in my head and trying out different approaches for a few days now and I’ve searched SO (see What is best practice in converting XML to Java object?) and also Google for using JAXB over XSLT but cannot find a suitable answer. Over the years I’ve used Castor, JIBX and XSLT for various projects, so I know a little bit about XML binding.

My problem is that I have a very flat XML structure and I want to unmarshall it to Java classes and persist them directly to a relational database (has to be Oracle). A small example…

<Output>
    <Channel>
        <channelId>1</channelId>
        <genreId>1</genreId>
    </Channel>
    <Channel>
        <channelId>2</channelId>
        <genreId>2</genreId>
    </Channel>
    <Genre>
        <genreId>1</genreId>
        <name>Movies</name>
    </Genre>
    <Genre>
        <genreId>2</genreId>
        <name>Sport</name>
    </Genre>
    <ChannelName>
        <channelId>1</channelId>
        <name>The Movie Channel</name>
    </ChannelName>
    <ChannelName>
        <channelId>2</channelId>
        <name>The Sport Channel</name>
    </ChannelName>
</Output>

What I really want for the XML above is just two simple annotated classes in a OneToOne relationship, that I can persist using JPA. Basically I want classes that reflect the database tables like so:

class Channel {
    Long id;
    String name;
    Genre genre;        
}

class Genre {
    Long id;
    String name;       
}

The XML will only ever be unmarshalled and I am really looking for the simplest solution to this problem which I realise can be a subjective question.

I am a fan of XSLT so am really asking if it’s good design to use XSLT to bend the original XML into a better structure the more closely matches the code and then just use some very simple JAXB annotations to bind to my classes. Or should I opt for doing the “transformation” using JAXB which I think would involve more actual Java code, for example XMLAdapters and more annotations. Basically, what is the benefit, or what else does JAXB give me over XSLT?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    JAXB is the Java object-to-XML binding API.

    XSL-T transforms XML to XML.

    They don’t feel like the same thing to me. The end result might be XML, but the source is different in each case.

    I think the answer depends on your comfort level with each technology. If the XSL-T and JAXB combination feels natural to you, by all means go in that direction – unless it’s a runtime operation that’s performed repeatedly. In that case I’d say that performance might be a concern, depending on the complexity of the transformations.

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