Use of Spring oxm

Question

I am new to spring. I was looking into spring-oxm's XStreamMarshaller. I was hoping to find a way to convert my objects into xml using this. The spring site tells me clearly how to do it but it still needs me to add a XStream dependency in my POM. I don't understand what the use of spring-oxm is? If i had to add the xstream dependency anyway then i can directly use xstreams toXml operation and be done with it? I would really appreciate any help I could get in understanding the use of spring-oxm.

Thanks a lot in advance!

Answer 1

Spring provides a higher level abstraction for you by eliminating the scaffolding code you need to write. For e.g. in case of OXM you will be working with Marshaller and Unmarshaller abstractions irrespective of the underlying implementations uses (XStream, JAXB, Castor, XmlBeans etc). Moreover it lets you use DI for injecting marshalling/unmarshalling services to your own services. Another advantage is consistent exception hierarchy irrespective of the underlying implementation. All these are well explained on their reference documentation.

If you have very simple needs and doesn't already use Spring then I suggest you stick to JAXB that comes with JDK 6.