| Java offers several options for handling XML structures and files. One of the most common and used ones is JAXB. JAXB stands for Java Architecture for XML Binding. It offers the possibility to convert Java objects into XML structures and the other way around. JAXB comes with the JRE standard bundle since the first versions of the JRE 1.6. The first specification of JAXB was done in March 2003 and the work process is tracked in the Java Specification Request 31. In this specification request you can find a lot of information regarding the long life of JAXB and all the improvements that have been made. As already mentioned, JAXB is included in the JRE bundle since the update 1.6. Before that it was necessary to include their libraries in the specific Java project in order to be able to use it. Before JAXB was available (long time ago), the way Java had to handle XML documents was the DOM. This was not a very good approach because there was almost not abstraction from XML nodes into Java objects and all value types were inferred as Strings. JAXB provides several benefits like Object oriented approach related to XML nodes and attributes, typed values, annotations and may others that we are going to explain in this article. All examples in this tutorial have been implementing using the following software versions: JRE 1.8.0 for 32b. The IDE used is Eclipse SDK Version: Luna (4.4). However any other Java versions containing the JAXB API and IDEs should work perfectly fine since all the code is standard Java 8 one. | 
