Dave Maddison from BEA sent me this link about XMLBeans, their new technology which facilitates typed access to XML documents from Java. BEA provide a nice web service which returns XMLBeans classes from user-submitted schemas; apart from this I can't spot any advantages over existing data binding tools like Castor and Zeus (I'm sure Dave will tell me some). Even better, he'll start a blog of his own so I can keep up to date on these things.