No More Schema First

When working with XML in Java I used to be a strong proponent of "schema first" design. With "schema first" design you create an XML schema to describe your data and then generate the supporting Java artifacts from that schema definition.

Recent work that I've been doing, however, has changed my mind. I no longer think "schema first" is the best way to go. I now recommend "java first".

There are several reasons that I've come to that conclusion. Here is a brief summary:

1. The reason that tipped the scale was the desire to annotate my Java beans with annotations beyond just JAXB. I wanted my model beans to be annotated for both JAXB and JPA. When starting with "schema first" I could not do this. I just got JAXB annotations and that was it. If I want to annotate with multiple types of annotations I need to start with "java first".
2. Maven projects that specify schema compilation don't import well into common IDEs. The projects imported in this way would not build correctly in the IDE because the IDE wouldn't do the Schema compilation.
3. I often struggled with the JAXB bindings generated by the schema compiler. I would often spend a lot of time struggling to work around binding that just weren't what I needed.
4. JSON is starting to take over the network world and generally JSON and dynamic languages like Javascript don't care about schemas.