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:

@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:

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