We wanted to upgrade our project in order to use some up-to-date dependencies. In the moment we use jaxb for XML reading and writing. This is working very good.
In some cases we do not have an xsd or dtd in order to generate the java classes (via xjc). In those cases we use dom4j for creating xml documents or dom4j with xpath for reading xml documents.
The version 1.6.1 is over ten years old and as far as I understand, dom4j needs jaxen as the X-Path library. Jaxen 1.1.6 is also 4 years old. Also we removed from our project xerces 2.40 (also 12 years old).
What XML API is state of the art in the moment? It should support XPATH expressions and should create and read xml documents.
Also I am wondering about xerces. When we use JAXB for reading xml documents, sometimes we have an object values instead of a string, date or something else.
The reason for that is that somebody messed up the xsd and forgot do define a datatype for some elements. XJC creates simple object properties inside the generated java class. The strange thing is, that I needed to cast the object to an "ElementNSImpl" object. This object comes from the xerces project.
I am a little bit confused. Our solution for removing xerces was to define each element with a proper datatype. Unfortunately those XSDs are third party XSD and we have to fix that each time the XSD will change. But why do I have to cast the object in ElementNSImpl?
Thanks for your help.
