Actually I like XmlBeans a lot. Define a XML-Schema (XSD) for your XML-File, throw XmlBeans at it and let it generate some Java classes. Voila. XML-Binding. Validate against the XML-Schema, easily access your XML-File from within Java, etc... XML? Java? Done!
There's even a Maven Plugin for it, so one can generate the classes on the fly within your build process. Great Stuff!
So why would some half insane person want to removed it?
Well, one drawback is the size of the lib. Because XmlBeans is your Swiss army knife of XML-Java-Binding it is rather large being around 2,6 MB in size. Altough this is not that bad in DSL-century you can still notice it when running a Java Applet or Java Webstart.
Another and somewhat profoundly drawback is, that in a Java Webstart it seems to parse Xml-Files very very slow. I'm not sure what exactly causes this slowdown but from what I grasp this might be a classLoader issue or something. When run localy everything works fine but from within a Webstart Version it runs painfully slow. I've tried to pinpoint what causes these issues but had not much luck in doing so.
Now I've settled to get rid of XmlBeans and replace it with some simpler form of xml parsing. What I'm currently using is XPP3</a>. Hopefully this will remove the issues. The lib is very small (25 KB) and very fast. The only drawback so far is that I lose the Schema-Validation. I'll keep the XML-Schema for development and documentation purposes but the actual Loader inside Nifty won't check against the Schema anymore. Which is a bit sad but something I can't do anything about at this very moment.</p>