EclipseLink MOXy as a JAXB provider

EclipseLink MOXy is a JAXB provider and is a compelling alternative to the default JAXB provider built into JDK.

First a simple test to marshal a Java object to XML:

This is the model:

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@XmlRootElement(name="MemberDetailsRequest", namespace="http://bk.org/memberservice/") @XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD) public class MemberDetailsRequest {    public MemberDetailsRequest() {  }    public MemberDetailsRequest(Long id) {   this.id = id;  }    private Long id;    public Long getId() {   return id;  }    public void setId(Long id) {   this.id = id;  } }

and the test for marshalling:

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package org.bk.memberservice.binding;   import static org.hamcrest.MatcherAssert.assertThat; import static org.hamcrest.Matchers.containsString; import static org.hamcrest.Matchers.is;   import java.io.StringWriter;   import javax.xml.bind.JAXBContext; import javax.xml.bind.Marshaller;   import org.bk.memberservice.message.MemberDetailsRequest; import org.junit.Test;   public class TestJaxbRequestBinding {    @Test  public void testJaxbBinding() throws Exception{   JAXBContext jaxbContext = JAXBContext.newInstance(MemberDetailsRequest.class);   assertThat((jaxbContext instanceof org.eclipse.persistence.jaxb.JAXBContext), is(true));   Marshaller marshaller = jaxbContext.createMarshaller();       MemberDetailsRequest memberDetailsRequest = new MemberDetailsRequest();   memberDetailsRequest.setId(1L);   StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();       marshaller.marshal(memberDetailsRequest, writer);   String marshalledXml = writer.toString();   assertThat(marshalledXml, containsString("MemberDetailsRequest"));  } }

The highlighted line checks to make sure that MOXy's JAXBContext is the one created.

So to use MOXy as the JAXB provider, first step is to get the jar files,

I had a little difficulty finding the MOXy jars to be used in a Maven pom file, this is what worked for me:

<repository>
            <id>EclipseLink Repo</id>
            <url>http://download.eclipse.org/rt/eclipselink/maven.repo</url>
            <name>EclipseLink Repo</name>
        </repository>

  <dependency>
            <groupId>org.eclipse.persistence</groupId>
            <artifactId>org.eclipse.persistence.moxy</artifactId>
            <version>2.4.0</version>
        </dependency>

The next step is to instruct to set MOXy as the JAXB provider. This is done by placing a jaxb.properties along with any of the JAXB model classes. So in this case, I have placed a jaxb.properties into my package holding MemberDetailsRequest class, and the contents are the following:

javax.xml.bind.context.factory = org.eclipse.persistence.jaxb.JAXBContextFactory

and that's it!

Reference:
Blaise Dougan's Blog: http://blog.bdoughan.com/ and his very enthusiastic participation in Stack Overflow