I finally released my small open source project called XML Factory to the free world this weekend,  You can check it out at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xmlfactory/ .  Hopefully it'll be useful to someone.  The inspiration for the project came from the Oracle XML SQL functions.  At first, I found them verbose, however I now appreciate their simplicity, ease of use and power.  I decided that Java too needed such an XML library and I've tried to reproduce that in my project.  Furthermore, I don't appreciate that most XML serialization techniques require heavy customization of my Java beans via annotations or the like and wanted my project to be more "bolt-on".  Well take a look at it and feel free to submit any feature requests or if you have any suggestions, please let me know.