# Professional services

## Introduction

As already explained, Castor is an open-source product. This means that the
source code is available at no charge and may be obtained from [github](http://github.com/castor-data-binding)
using git. Due to the *open source* nature of the project, there is no guaranteed level of
support (*of commercial quality*) offered by the project and its
community.
      
Still, there are a growing number of third party individuals/companies
providing such support in the form of *professional services*.
This page provides you with a directory of individuals/companies
offering commercial services related to individual or all areas
of Castor.
      
We hope that the information provided is of value to you, our users,
and the individuals/companies displayed below will be more than happy
to discuss any suggestions/recommendations related to this offerings.

# Individuals/Companies and their commercial offerings

## Companies

### Indoqa

Contact: Werner Guttmann (werner DOT guttmann AT indoqa DOT com)

*Indoqa* offers expertise in the area of J2EE applications, with a strong 
emphasis on the integration of the following (essential) framework areas:

* object/relational mapping tools
* XML data binding frameworks
* Spring

in general and Castor XML in particular. Above that, we aspire to 
support clients in their focus to integrate such frameworks into their 
enterprise computing platforms

In the person of *Werner Guttmann*, Indoqa provides a long-time committer 
of Castor, who has been responsible for:

* Improving and maintaining both Castor JDO and XML
* Enhancing the Castor XML code generator
* Providing JPA 3.0 compliance
* Providing JAXB 2.1 compliance
* Castor JDO offering for Spring ORM
* Castor XML offering for Spring
            
### CODA: Financial Intelligence (http://www.coda.com/)

Contact: Andrew Fawcett (andrew.fawcett@coda.com)

As a developer of international financial management and
procurement systems, CODA started a project to XML-enable our Financials
application server," noted Andrew Fawcett of CODA. "We made two major
technology decisions. The first was to use the W3C XML Schema to
describe our XML messages. The second was to facilitate the use of an
XML Data Binding framework. This allows our developers to process XML
messages in a more productive and intuitive way within their programs,
without requiring extensive training and experience with XML or its
traditional APIs such as SAX or DOM. In performing an analysis of XML
Data Binding frameworks, we found that Castor was the only
implementation at the time that met our needs in terms of its support
for W3C XML Schema and its ability to integrate with our Web
infrastructure.

In addition, we use Castor internally within our
Web client-enabling framework (based on the Java Servlet API). Java
source code produced by the Castor source code generator is used to
dynamically bind data to our Web forms. The resulting data can then be
marshaled directly between our Web applications and application server."

### Syscon Ingenieurbüro für Meß- und Datentechnik GmbH (http://www.syscon.eu/)

Contact: Ralf Joachim (ralf.joachim@syscon.eu)

Syscon is primarily concerned with the developement of custom-build/purpose-build
software solutions and the design of database systems since its foundation in 1996.
For 4 years we have been developing Java applications in enterprise environment.
For these applications, we frequently use our own client/server framework side by
side with open source projects such as the data binding framework Castor, where
one of our engineers is an active committer.
