Java XML binding deals with transforming the XML instances to the Java instances and vice versa. Even though we can do this by writing Java code from scratch against the XML APIs, today we have multiple tools and frameworks which will do the same.

The above figure shows a typical scenario we might come across in B2B interactions. Leave the advanced validations or CRUD operations one can do in the XML documents alone, we are interested in the marshalling and unmarshalling functionality of the JAXB. XML is the de-facto wire format in SOA and SOI. If we need to process the XML data from within our Java components, we have to do some form of XML binding. The frameworks such as Castor and XMLBeans do exactly this. JAXB is the Java reference implementation for Java XML binding. Today, we have XStream which will do the same functionality quickly. Let us see how these frameworks are relevant in the JBI discussion.