What is the Java analogue of .NET's XML serialization?
11 Answers
2008 Answer The "Official" Java API for this is now JAXB - Java API for XML Binding. See Tutorial by Oracle. The reference implementation lives at http://jaxb.java.net/
2018 Update Note that the Java EE and CORBA Modules are deprecated in SE in JDK9 and to be removed from SE in JDK11. Therefore, to use JAXB it will either need to be in your existing enterprise class environment bundled by your e.g. app server, or you will need to bring it in manually.
XStream is pretty good at serializing object to XML without much configuration and money! (it's under BSD license).
We used it in one of our project to replace the plain old java-serialization and it worked almost out of the box.
"Simple XML Serialization" Project
You may want to look at the Simple XML Serialization project. It is the closest thing I've found to the System.Xml.Serialization in .Net.
XMLBeans works great if you have a schema for your XML. It creates Java objects for the schema and creates easy to use parse methods.
If you're talking about automatic XML serialization of objects, check out Castor:
Castor is an Open Source data binding framework for Java[tm]. It's the shortest path between Java objects, XML documents and relational tables. Castor provides Java-to-XML binding, Java-to-SQL persistence, and more.
Usually I use jaxb or XMLBeans if I need to create objects serializable to XML. Now, I can see that XStream might be very useful as it's nonintrusive and has really simple api. I'll play with it soon and probably use it. The only drawback I noticed is that I can't create object's id on my own for cross referencing.
@Barak Schiller
Thanks for posting link to XStream!
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