Sun has posted an early draft review of Java Specification Request 222: Java™ API for XML Data Binding 2.0. This makes various minor updates to suypport Java 1.5 features. align the spec with JAX-RPC 2.0, and support subsitution groups.
This whole spec is based on a very outmoded and discredited W3C XML Schema-centric view of the world. Most laughable line: "Any nontrivial application of XML will, then, be based upon one or more schemas and will involve one or more programs that create, consume, and manipulate documents whose syntax and semantics are governed by those schemas;" and by "schemas" they really do mean W3C XML Schema Language schemas exclusively. Hmm, I guess XSLT, DocBook, OpenOffice, and RSS are all trivial, then? But really, this spec gets things monstrously wrong in almost every paragraph. I don't think the authors have any clue just how myopic their view of XML really is. Comments are due by July 23, but sometimes it's best just to ignore fundamentally broken things and let them die a quiet death in the market.
Sun has also posted an early draft review of Java Specification Request 224: Java™ API for XML-Based RPC (JAX-RPC) 2.0. JAX-RPC is a java API for working with SOAP and WSDL based web services.
This draft addresses the following goals and requirements:
- Addition of client side asynchrony
- Improved support for document and message centric usage
- Integration with JAXB
- Improvements to the handler framework
- Improved protocol neutrality
Subsequent versions of this document will address the following additional goals and requirements:
- Support for WS-I Basic Profile 1.1 and Attachments Profile 1.0
- Support for SOAP 1.2
- Support for WSDL 2.0
- Versioning and evolution of web services
- Web services security
- Integration with JSR 181 (Web Services Metadata)
- Service endpoint model
- Runtime services
Comments are due by July 23.
Syntext has released Dtd2Xs 2.0, a tool for converting complex, modularized XML DTDs to W3C XML Schema Language schemas. Dtd2Xs runs on Windows and Linux. Dtd2Xs is $49 on Windows, $39 on Linux, and free for non-commercial use. Version 2.0 adds a graphical user interface.