Question

I have a java library, I would like to save an instance of a java object to a text file. I have tried to use all java libraries for serialization and deserialization to xml: http://karussell.wordpress.com/2009/09/03/xml-serializers-for-java/ but deserializing does not work. I have posted a question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6139702/deserializing-xml-file-from-xstream but It seems that I could not get a solution for that.

I also have tried to serialize to json but deserialize from json does not work.

So, I would like to know apart of serializing to xml and json, is there any other way to do serialization and deserialization from a java object (cannot modify to add tags: @XmlRootElement(name="customer")) to text file?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The easiest way is probably to use the native Java serialization. It will generate a binary representation of the object, but you can encode the generated byte array with Base64 to transform it to text:

ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(baos);
oos.writeObject(myObject);
oos.flush();
byte[] binary = baos.toByteArray();
String text = Base64.encodeBase64String(binary); // Base64 is in the apache commons codec library
// save text to a file

Note that the object, and every object it references (recursively) must implement java.io.Serializable for this to work.