Introduction One of the nice recent features of Spring (2.x era) is support for custom XML. This is the way that Spring itself has added all kinds of new tags such as <util:list> and <mvc:annotation-driven>. The way this works is pretty elegant, to the point that it makes an interesting alternative for configuring Java using XML, particularly if the application already uses Spring. I’ve written an example application to try to give an easily-copied example of how it’s done.

Apache Digester is a venerable library for parsing XML and turning it into a graph of Java objects. There are a lot of libraries out there for parsing and writing XML, and Digester isn’t the most performant at runtime, doesn’t support writing XML back out again, and can seem a little inaccessible to new users. But I like it very much, and it’s a very powerful tool in my toolbox.