Question

I’m struggling to understand Java Simple. Something about it looks very cool but I can’t get my head around how to use it.

I can’t find a ‘Hello World’ example that demonstrates how the bits-and-pieces fit together. I’m looking for something like this;

Expected output

<durr/>

Demo.java

public class Demo {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
       String str = new Foo();
       System.out.println(str);
    }
}

Foo.java

import org.simpleframework.xml.Root;

@Root
public class Foo{
    // Something
}

Compile and run

javac Demo.java Foo.java
java Demo

Summary

What is the simplest demo that can output <durr/> using Simple?

Answer 1

Quoting directly from simple’s documentation:

To serialize an instance of the above object a Persister is required. The persister object is then given an instance of the annotated object and an output result, which is a file in this example. Other output formats are possible with the persister object.

So basically, I would say your Demo class could be written in the following way:

import java.io.File;
import org.simpleframework.xml.Serializer; 
import org.simpleframework.xml.core.Persister;

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

   Foo foo = new Foo();
   Serializer serializer = new Persister(); 
   File result = new File("example.xml"); // XML OUTPUT WILL BE WRITTEN HERE
   serializer.write(foo, result);
}

Once again, based on the documentation I would say this will generate a <foo/> tag , because it’s your class’ name, to change it to <duur/> output you have to redefine the name in the root tag in your Foo class, like this:

import org.simpleframework.xml.Root;

@Root(name="durr")
public class Foo{
 // Something
}