posted 14 years ago
Maybe I'm being unfair to Castor, but at one time it was the only game in town, and it did a good job. These days, you don't hear that much about it, so I'm thinking that it no longer is the optimal tool for most tasks. In fact, I think that the JOnAS project switched from Castor to Zeus, and then abandoned Zeus for something more along the lines of a mainstream standard.
Of course, there also seemed to be a certain amount of ill-will among some because Castor claimed the acronym JDO, despite the conflict with the real JDO, so some of that could be politics.
On the inbound side, the Apache Digester remains popular. I've also used STaX where I wanted directed streaming input.
Finally, there are some JPA implementations that can persist to/from XML, if that's useful.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.