MTOM Attachments with JAXB

MTOM is a standard which allows your services to transfer binary data efficiently and conveniently. Many frameworks have support for MTOM - Axis2, JAX-WS RI, JBoss WS, XFire, Microsoft's WCF, and more.

If the binary is part of the XML document, it needs to be base64 encoded - taking CPU time and increasing the payload size. When MTOM is enabled on a service, it takes binary data which might normally be part of the XML document, and creates an attachment for it.

Enabling MTOM is a rather simple process. First, you must annotate your schema type or POJO to let JAXB know that a particular field could be a candidate for MTOM optimization. Second, you just tell CXF that you wish to enable MTOM.

This page tells you how to activate MTOM for JAXB. MTOM is also supported in Aegis.