Michael Champion wrote:

> Sure, jAXB has their mapping, other Java vendors have their mapping,
> Indigo has their mapping ... getting them to interop is the problem
> AFAIK.

Agreed.

 > I don't know how much of this is everyone wanting to standardize
> on what they do, and  and how much of it is real conceptual
> differences between the platforms.

I hadn't really thought about the differences between platforms, but 
since virtually all data binding products use Java or C/C++ (there are a 
few for Python and COM) I'm not sure how much of a problem this is.

 > There are a lot of smart people
> working on this and I don't get a sense that the problems are just NIH
> / "can't we all just get along  by doing it MY way".

A lot of data binding products are open source and I think the problem 
is not so much NIH as, "Oh, somebody else invented that, too?" But for 
the commercial or major open source projects, the motivation seems to be 
just that people thought they had a better solution. Other than JAXB, I 
haven't seen anybody really trying to push standardization.

-- Ron