In other words, JAXB allows storing and retrieving data in memory in any XML format, without the need to implement a specific set of XML loading and saving routines for the program's class structure.

JAXB 1.0 was released in 2003, having been developed under the Java Community Process as JSR 31.

[2] Reference implementations for these specifications were available under the CDDL open source license at java.net.

The tool "xjc" can be used to convert XML Schema and other schema file types (as of Java 1.6, RELAX NG, XML DTD, and WSDL are supported experimentally) to class representations.

In addition, JAXB includes a "schemagen" tool that can essentially perform the inverse of "xjc", creating an XML Schema from a set of annotated classes.