Generation Tools: Binding and Schema Generation

Generation Tools

This pair of add-on tools support generating a basic binding definition from a set of Java classes, and generating a basic schema from the combination of a binding definition and the associated set of Java classes. The generation support is fairly primitive, and may well require hand modification to complete in complex cases. Both tools try to indicate to the user where hand modifications may be needed.

Installation

The distribution zip file for the tools contains these documentation pages along with a pair of jars containing the actual executable code for the tools, jibx-genbinding.jar and jibx-genschema.jar. The easiest way to use these jars is to copy them into the lib directory of your JiBX installation. If you do this the tools will automatically find the required JiBX classes when they're run and you won't need to set up any special classpath information (except for your own classes). This is the approach that's assumed for this documentation. If you prefer to keep the tool jars separately from the JiBX installation you'll need to add the jar files from the JiBX lib directory (jibx-bind.jar, jibx-run.jar, bcel.jar, xpp3.jar, and possibly jibx-extras.jar) to the classpath when running the tools.

Status

The current Beta 0.4 version of these tools includes some minor enhancements compared to earlier versions, particularly with regard to arrays. It should be usable for many purposes directly, though the output can be far from optional and may require manual corrections. The tools are being replaced as part of the JiBX 1.2 work, in which they are becoming integrated components of the core JiBX distribution. An initial version of the replacement tools have been made available as part of the Jibx2Wsdl code-first WSDL generator. There's currently no documentation for using the binding generator and schema generator components directly, but this will be coming as part of an initial beta release of JiBX 1.2 in June, 2008.

The source code for the tools is included in the main JiBX project CVS. The actual building of the jars is done using the jar-tools target in the JiBX Ant build.xml.