Today has been a day of much messing with markup. Put my safari account to good use delving through the O’Reilly books on Java and XML data binding, XML Schema and (just out of curiosity) Java NIO.

Digester is a very handy utility for quickly populating java objects from XML. Brilliant for config files. I’m experimenting with using it to put together a quick declarative framework for turning CSV files into XML. I define my CSV-to-XML mappings as XML and use Digester to build the mapping objects. Once the data has been turned into XML, I should be able to use Castor to build my business objects. And all without having to go near a parser.