What is Aegis?

Aegis is a databinding. That is, it is a subsystem that can map Java objects to XML documents described by XML schema, and vica-versa. Aegis is designed to give useful mappings with a minimum of programmer effort, while allowing detailed control and customization.

Aegis began as part of XFire, and moved with XFire into Apache CXF.

You can use Aegis independently of CXF as a mechanism for mapping Java objects to and from XML. This page, however, describes Aegis as used inside of CXF.

Aegis has some advantages over JAXB for some applications. Some users find that it produces a more natural XML mapping for less configuration. For example, Aegis has a default setting for 'nillable', allowing you to declare it for your entire service in one place instead of having to annotate every single element. The biggest advantage of Aegis, however, is a convenient way to customize the mapping without adding (@)annotations to your Java code. This allows you to avoid class loading dependencies between your data classes and your web service binding.

Getting Started: Basic Use of Aegis

You can configure any web service to use the Aegis data binding. A service configured with Aegis will yield a valid WSDL description, and you can use that to configure any client that you like. You can talk to an Aegis service with JAXB, or .NET, or a scripted language, or ... Aegis itself.

You can use Aegis as a client to talk to Aegis, by using the very same Java classes and configuration files in the client environment that you use on the server. However, it's not all that practical to use Aegis as a client to talk to some a service using some other data binding, since Aegis lacks a 'wsdl2java' tool.