In this article, I will describe a useful but much underused feature of Spring, the definition of custom tags in the Spring beans definition files.

JAXB is a bridge between the Java and the XML worlds, enabling your code to transparently marshalls and unmarshalls your Java objects to and from XML. In order to do this, you should have a class representing your XML-Schema. This class is created by the xjc. In most cases, xjc creates a class that won’t suit your needs. In this article, we’ll see why it does so and what we can do to customize this behaviour.