Newbie XML to/froPOJO question.

[Jason Pepper]

Are there any convenient free libraries to do the XML <-> POJO translation.
I know of JAXB (but I need to have an XSD to generate a POJO or do I?)

I need something that does the XML <-> POJO without any additional steps.
No xsd, dtd. It should just work!

Ideally, the XML <-> POJO translation should be idempotent so that I can
use XPath on the XML and the same XPath on the POJO (using Apache JXPath)
to get to a node.

anything out there?

[Paul Clapham]

Too many to mention here. Google for "xml java data binding" and you will get plenty of information.

[Jeff Albertson]

Are you expecting to generate a POJO class without a DTD or XSD? consider the following series of sample "documents".

<person>
   <name>Jeff</name>
   <age>45</age>
</person>
 
<person sex="M">
   <name>Jeff</name>
   <age>adult</age>
   <allergy>peanuts</allegry>
</person>
 
<person sex="M">
   <name>Jeff</name>
   <age>adult</age>
   <allergy>peanuts</allegry>
   <allergy>C++</allegry>
</person>

Based on the first one, you might want getAge to have some numeric return type, but later examples confound that. The first example doesn't demonstrate the non-required sex attribute, and what about allegies? It's only when you get to the third example that you see Person has a list of allegies. This makes me thing that if you wanted to generate a useful POJO from XML documents you would need to supply several example and then use some sort of fancy neural net algorithms to discover the underlying POJO type. Or bite the bullet and work from an XML Schema