This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Joe Walnes. Original Post: XStream is nearing a release Feed Title: Joe's New Jelly Feed URL: http://joe.truemesh.com/blog/index.rdf Feed Description: The musings of a ThoughtWorker obsessed with Agile, XP, maintainability, Java, .NET, Ruby and OpenSource. Mmm'kay? Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Joe Walnes Latest Posts From Joe's New Jelly

XStream is a simple object -> xml -> object serialization tool. There are many other tools that do similar things out there. Here are some of the features that distinguish it from the others:

• Very fast.
• Requires no custom mappings to be created.
• Can serialize objects that have private fields and non-default constructors.
• Handles arbitary objects and collections.
• Produces very clean XML; the kind a human would write.
• Does not duplicate any information in the XML that can be obtained via reflection.
• Decoupled from XML implementations. Use it with DOM, JDOM, DOM4J, or even non-XML streams (such as custom configuration objects, YAML or properties files).
• Open source, BSD license.

Here's an example chunk of XML produced by XStream:

<person>
  <firstname>Joe</firstname>
  <lastname>Walnes</lastname>
  <phone>
    <area>123</area>
    <number>1234-456</number>
  </phone>
  <fax>
    <area>123</area>
    <number>9999-999</number>
  </fax>
</person>