XML is quite common nowadays, especially in the application integration business that I am involved in. However, I still see companies making big mistakes when they decide to start using XML (for example as the exchange format with their business partners). This series of posts is about mistakes (or at least clumsiness) in using XML that I noticed during several projects.

Not making (useful) use of namespaces

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XML is quite common nowadays, especially in the application integration business that I am involved in. However, I still see companies making big mistakes when they decide to start using XML (for example as the exchange format with their business partners). This series of posts is about mistakes (or at least clumsiness) in using XML that I noticed during several projects.

Only change the syntax of the CSV file (no normalization)

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XML is quite common nowadays, especially in the application integration business that I am involved in. However, I still see companies making big mistakes when they decide to start using XML (for example as the exchange format with their business partners). This post is about one of the mistakes I noticed during one of my projects.

Not using a schema (XSD) or DTD

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Although there are a lot of evaluators available in Mule CE it is very easy to add your own evaluator. In my case we have a self defined message format that holds some properties in the header of a message (similar to JMS Message, MuleMessage, etc.). To get access to these properties in the Mule config I created a custom evaluator that made this possible. Although there will be other solutions available for this situation, I found this a nice (pragmatic) way to solve it. It also provides a base to start from in case of possible changes in the future.
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When you use Mule to integrate several applications that are ‘talking’ xml, sooner or later you will end up translating XML messages from one format to another. This can be done with XSLT that has very powerful abilities. I have already posted about these techniques here and here. Sometimes you just need some more power, so you end up using XSLT2 specific functions. That shouldn’t be a problem as long as you can make sure that the XSLT engine that is used at runtime does understand XSLT2!
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In my last post I told about the XSLT processing that I have to do to get the XSD as I wanted it to be. Unfortunately there is not just one XSD that has to be processed but there are actually several of them. And for every change in our CDM (Common Data Model) I had to perform all these transformations by hand. Now that doesn’t feel good so I decided to automate that process. And since we are already heavily using Maven I also wanted to do this with Maven, which actuallly is rather easy to do. I even added a validation step so I can test the created XSD at the same time.
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Recently I ran into an issue with a XSD that I had generated by using our modelling tool. It appeared the XSD did not match with my wishes so I had to modify the XSD. Now I could do this by hand quite easily but that would mean I had to redo it every time I regenerated the XSD after a model change. So I decided to use XSLT for the modifications. I have used XSLT quite extensively at previous projects but these where about 8 years ago and it just made me realize how fast one looses his knowledge if you don’t use it anymore.
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Currently I am looking into the possiblities Mule has to offer for our project. One of the things that must be done is to transform a message on our (Tibco) queue to a JAXB object so we can use the object as parameter in our call to an EJB3 bean. How to call a EJB3 bean from Mule I have explained here. In this post I want to show how we setup our JAXB transformer. This transformer isn’t standard available in Mule but, as you will see, it is pretty easy to create your own transformer.
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I have blogged before about how to generate JAXB binding classes based on your WSDL file, this time I wanted to generate JAXB classes based on just XSD files. Although I expected this to be simple, it took me quite some time to get it right, so I decided to give this item its own post :-)
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In my former post (here) I described how to combine Spring WS with StAX parsing the SOAP messages. I ended with generating the WSDL as a test and said you could use Soap UI for testing the web service.
Well, I did. And I was running into the following error when I had deployed my web service at JBoss4.0.5.GA:

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