The XML Apache Project has released XMLBeans 2.0, one of many XML data binding frameworks for Java. This one is based on the W3C XML Schema Language and also provides access to the full underlying XML Infoset through an XML Cursor API. New features in 2.0 include:
This release also claims to increase performance. However, some of that comes from using the Piccolo XML parser, which concerns me. Piccolo was a promising non-validating parser written in Java using a compiler generator instead of a hand-written parser. However, it has got more than a few bugs, and the developer hasn't made any progress on fixing them for a long time. Perhaps the XMLBeans Project has started fixing those bugs themselves, which would be nice since it would be a shame to see an otherwise promising parser languish. However, if they haven't then that's a big step backward, and virtually guaranteed to introduce bugs into XMLBeans they may not have noticed yet.