post past :: james murty

I have long been irked by the difficulty of creating simple XML documents in Java code. While Java has excellent support for handling XML in general, if you just need to whip up a quick document -- say, to interact with a web service API -- you can quickly get lost in a messy quagmire of JAXP code that is difficult to write, to debug, and to stomach.

In the past, I have often resorted to building small XML documents using string concatenation to avoid this headache. And I've felt ashamed every time. Well, no more!

The XMLBuilder project I have just made available via Google Code contains a single utility class that makes it simple to create XML documents using relatively sparse Java code.

To create this XML document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<projects>
    <java-xmlbuilder language="Java" scm="SVN">
        <location type="URL">
            http://code.google.com/p/java-xmlbuilder/
        </location>
    </java-xmlbuilder>
    <jetS3t language="Java" scm="CVS">
        <location type="URL">
            http://jets3t.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
        </location>
    </jetS3t>
</projects>

You would use the following code, which is nicely terse and closely resembles the structure of the XML document it produces:

XMLBuilder builder = XMLBuilder.create("Projects")
    .e("java-xmlbuilder")
        .a("language", "Java")
        .a("scm","SVN")
        .e("Location")
            .a("type", "URL")
            .t("http://code.google.com/p/java-xmlbuilder/")
        .up()
    .up()
    .e("JetS3t")
        .a("language", "Java")
        .a("scm","CVS")
        .e("Location")
            .a("type", "URL")
            .t("http://jets3t.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html");

If you're interested, head on over the the Google Code project and download a copy. Feedback is welcome.