Spring Batch provides transactional infrastructure for both reading XML records and mapping them to Java objects as well as writing Java objects as XML records. StAX API is used for I/O as other standard XML APIs do not fit batch processing requirements (DOM loads the whole input into memory at once and SAX controls the parsing process allowing the user only to provide callbacks). Spring Batch is not tied to any particular OXM technology. Typical use is to delegate OXM to Spring WS which provides uniform abstraction for the most popular OXM technologies. However dependency on Spring WS is optional and you can choose to implement Spring Batch specific interfaces if desired. Lets take a closer look how XML input and output work in batch. It is assumed the XML resource is a collection of 'fragments' corresponding to individual records. Note that OXM tools are designed to work with standalone XML documents rather than XML fragments cut out of an XML document, therefore the Spring Batch infrastructure needs to work around this fact (as described below). On input the reader reads the XML resource until it recognizes a new fragment is about to start (by matching the tag name by default). The reader creates a standalone XML document from the fragment (or at least makes it appear so) and passes the document to a deserializer (typically a wrapper around Spring WS Unmarshaller) to map the XML to a Java object. Output works symetrically to input. Java object is passed to a serializer (typically a wrapper around Spring WS Marshaller) which writes to output using a custom event writer that filters the StartDocument and EndDocument events produced for each fragment by the OXM tools. For example configuration of XML input and output see the sample xmlStaxJob. //TODO inline the example once it is not subject to change + show sample input file