Navigating JAXB

Oh what a lot of time we've wasted on this...

We ran into the <... minOccurs="0" nillable="true"> minefield this week... We've a Java CXF client talking to a (by way of what's effectively a proxy) some services delivered from a third party. The WSDL exposed by the server we were talking to had minOccurs="0" nillable="true", the downstream service was insistent that we not send a tag if it was nil (using the XML serialisation), only of course by saying minOccurs="0" nillable="true" the server we were talking to allowed two representations and CXF/JAXB picked the wrong one.

So we fixed the WSDL (and then got all confused because no one had changed the embedded version...) and then started discovering all sorts of things we didn't know before!

Number one – if you've a JAXB binding file and are using generateElementProperty, it looks like it's Boolean, but actually it's tri-state... confused the ... out of us for a while – more details here.

Number two – if you've got an element you want to be nil, don't even initialise the member... if you're running with generateElementProperty absent or false, you'll get empty tags generated even where minOccurs="0", not initialising the member at all will omit the tag.

CloudForce London 2012

Spent Tuesday at CloudForce... what a buzz about the place – like a show from the heyday of the 16 bit home computer era.

The big story of the show was Chatter, connect it to everything, build communities in it, see your timeline, you name it, it's in Chatter; the possibilities are endless. An ESB is the obvious integration technology – subscribe to some interesting business feed, have it call out to the Chatter RESTful API and start pushing real time business object chatter into a group.

Social was everything – Rypple for a social approach to objective management looked so much more engaging than anything I've ever seen before.

Heroku is a Salesforce acquisition, still hosted on Amazon (no really...) with an interesting deployment model ("git push heroku master"). Looks really interesting, still not sure about their Java deployment model – we seem to expend way too much effort understanding dependency problems, how you'd debug that when your deployment platform is compiling for you, I'm not clear; maybe we're doing something wrong...

Interesting tidbit – Salesforce have an internal Intranet... it sounds like it's like every Intranet you've ever see, static and out-of-date – Chatter and other real time feeds are what folk are using as their landing page; Burberry have switched – Chatter is their Intranet.

Oh and I defy you to get this track out of your head if you were there...!