JiBX XML data binding has been around for several years, and consistently demonstrates outstanding performance compared with other data binding tools. JiBX has also been usable for web services work for some time, by way of frameworks such as Apache Axis2, but when used in this way the performance advantages of JiBX are often outweighed by inefficiencies in the web services layer. Now there's an alternative way to use JiBX for web services: JiBX/WS is the new light-weight wrapper for JiBX which allows the XML data binding performance benefits to extend to web services work, delivering the best performance of any web services framework for Java (and quite possibly for any other programming language!).

The 1.2 release of JiBX includes support for building web services based on either existing Java code or an existing XML schema and WSDL. You'll see how to start with a set of Java data classes and a service implementation class, use the new JiBX 1.2 features to generate a customized schema definition that cleanly represents the data, and then turn this into a working service using both JiBX/WS and Axis2. You'll also get a quick look at going the other way, starting from a supplied WSDL+schema and generating Java code using JiBX data binding. And, yes - there'll be a performance demonstration plus some performance test results to back up the title claim!

Dennis Sosnoski is the designer and primary developer of JiBX data binding, a committer on Apache Axis2, and a member of the expert groups which steered the development of JAXB 2.0 and JAX-WS 2.0. He's an XML and web services expert who has written and presented widely on these topics, and works with clients worldwide.