JAXB on a never-ending stream.

Question

Hi.
Would it be considered possible to use JAXB to parse a never-ending stream of XML? For instance...
<foo:foo xmlns="some:namespace">
    <bar> ... </bar>
    <bar> ... </bar>
    <bar> ... </bar>
    <bar> ... </bar>
    <bar> ... </bar>
    ... continues for eternity ...
</foo:foo>Each time I parse a chunk I want to get one 'bar' element only. Namespaces dropped into 'foo' would have to correctly affect these individual documents, so simply consuming the first bit of the stream and asking it to parse multiple times is probably the wrong approach. :-)
And of course somewhere I would need to output the damn things again, and again with correct namespaces. So maybe it is too hard afterall.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is what crowse was suggesting, but you could potentially use a SAXParser to get the discreet <bar></bar> events and pump that to an Unmarshaller to return objects to you. You'll want to turn off validation on the Unmarshaller, since you've already been through that once with the SAXParser.
If you're interested in parsing streaming XML using JAXB, another alternative is to alter your protocol so that your repeating element is a toplevel element. You can then prefix the element length to the XML. This should allow you to quickly find the end of the element without having to actively parse it. You can then feed that packet to the Unmarshaller.
-S