The general steps to use the JAXB API are:

1. Bind the schema

Bind the schema for the XML document requires two steps:

Generate classes. An XML schema is used as input to the JAXB binding compiler to generate JAXB classes based on that schema.

Compile classes. All of the generated source files and the application code must be compiled.

2 Unmarshal

XML documents written according to the constraints in the source schema are unmarshalled by the JAXB binding framework i.e. the XML documents are unmarshalled into the Java content objects. Unmarshalling is a wider process, it includes the following steps to follow:

Generate content tree. The unmarshalling process generates a content tree of data objects instantiated from the generated JAXB classes; this content tree represents the structure and content of the source XML documents which are now directly available to the developers program. Now developer can access and process XML data without having to know XML or XML processing.

Validate (optional) the unmarshalling process optionally involves validation of the source XML documents before generating the content tree.

Process the content. The client application can modify the XML data represented by the Java content tree by means of interfaces generated by the binding compiler.

3. Marshal.

The processed content tree is marshalled out to one or more XML output documents. The content may be validated before marshalling.

Now its Time to Dig the Things Deeper

I. Bind the Schema

JAXB simplifies access to an XML document from a Java program by presenting the XML document to the program in a Java format. The first step in this process requires to bind the schema for the XML document into a set of Java classes that represents the schema. Where a schema is an XML specification that governs the allowable components of an XML document and the relationships between the components.

Binding: Binding a schema means generating a set of Java classes that represents the schema. All JAXB implementations provide a tool called a binding compiler to bind a schema (the way the binding compiler is invoked can be implementation-specific). For example, the JAXB Reference Implementation provides a binding compiler that one can invoke through scripts i.e. you may bind a schema with a binding compiler provided by the JAXB Reference Implementation.

The binding compiler generates a set of interfaces and a set of classes implementing the interfaces.

Then this binding compiler compiles and packages the generated interfaces and classes into a package.

II. Unmarshal the Document

Unmarshalling an XML document means creating a tree of content objects representing the content and the organization of the document. The content tree is not a DOMbased tree. In fact, content trees produced through JAXB are more efficient in terms of memory use than DOM-based trees.