Release News

The current production download code is the version 1.2.1 release. The 1.2 release added major new features to JiBX, including integrated support for binding, schema, and WSDL generation from existing code, code and binding generation from existing schemas, and modular binding compilation. The 1.2.1 release adds some relatively minor extensions, along with some bug fixes, including the following:

  • Code generation from schemas which do not use elementFormDefault="qualified"
  • Support for <xs:appinfo> elements in schema processing
  • Fix for <xs:annotation> elements as child elements of <xs:schema> element
  • Corrections in element and attribute ref handling, when referencing across namespaces

There are still some known limitations in the support for code generation from schema, which are discussed on the CodeGen page. Also note that the binding.dtd and binding.xsd XML grammar definitions for binding documents have not yet been updated to include new features added in the JiBX 1.2 release.

Incompatibility Note: The 1.2 code introduceed a number of backward-incompatible changes to the actual binding factory structure. If you compile a binding using the 1.2 or later binding compiler and then try to use the bound classes with an older runtime you'll get an error like:

Unable to access binding information for class xxx.xxx.xxx.Xxx
Make sure classes generated by the binding compiler are available at runtime

Status

There's still some work going on with extensions to the 1.2 features, some missing documentation, and some bugs in earlier versions which were not addressed in 1.2 or 1.2.1, so expect a 1.2.2 release before the end of March, 2009.

JiBX/WS, a full-featured replacement for the JibxSoap demonstration project, is also planned for release in March, 2009. JiBX/WS brings exciting new features for developers using JiBX with web services, including first-class support for both REST and POX web services, as well as SOAP, and substantial performance benefits as compared to other frameworks.

Work is also progressing on JiBX 2.0. The main focus of the 2.0 changes is an entirely new code generation model, which is designed to support both direct bytecode generation (as in the 1.X code) and source code generation. The actual development schedule depends on the needs of commercial clients of Sosnoski Software Associates Ltd and Sosnoski Software Solutions, Inc., which represent the main developers of the JiBX project and related subprojects. The best estimate based on current needs is for a beta release sometime in 2009.