I had opened a JIRA (GERONIMO-4197<https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/GERONIMO-4197>) which is intended to shift from using xmlbean classes to JAXB classes for making the task of PlanCreator easier by exposing the JAXB classes directly. I've been able to use this approach to maintain an object of the JAXB class 'Application' with javascript and use it to call a function through DWR that marshalls it into the deployment plan. Similarly, I'm able to unmarshal the plan if it is modified by the user and reflect those changes in the PlanCreator. The reason to shift from xmlbean to JAXB in this case was the way JAXB classes are organized- by adding just a few lines to dwr.xml, I can expose all those classes and use them to maintain a copy of the Application object. The same would have been a lot more tedious to configure and maintain in xmlbean, considering each class provides more functions and factory classes than what is needed by DWR. Earlier, this was being done by creating wrapper classes to the xmlbean which were becoming unmanagable and would need heavy maintenance with changes in the schema. I did have to modify some JAXB classes to have setters where it had only getters that returned live Lists to make it work with the DWR BeanConverter. So now this shift will help reduce a lot of bloated code from PlanCreator and improve maintainability. Since GEP already uses these classes we can shift the jar to geronimo and add a dependency in GEP and PlanCreator for the same. Opinions?
-- Shrey Banga Bachelor of Technology, III year Department of Electrical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee
