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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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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While performing the load test of our web service (of course with my favourite tool SoapUI) I was getting some errors when I used a number of threads at a time to call my service. Most error messages were related to an invalid XML format of the incoming message. I was told this probably had something to do with SoapUI (that would be the first drawback with it…). When multiple threads are used in SoapUI to sent the messages, they somehow would get mixed up and invalid SOAP messages were sent. So I was told.
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So far I have worked a lot with Java and XML but mostly with the DOM parser. For my current project I had to split a big XML document into smaller ‘messages’ and put these small messages on a queue. Well, if you have the same experience as I do with DOM then you know that that is not going to work without a lot of available memory. So that’s why I chose a SAX parser and to be more specific a StAX parser.
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