Is there an available, standard XML schema which describes the general structure and content of Java Objects? I have searched for this to no avail.
I am relatively new to both XML in general, and various Java based XML technologies (primarily JaxB) in particular, so forgive me if I have overlooked something.
It’s not an official Oracle/Sun standard, but a third-party tool, JSX, serializes java objects to xml, and has an XML Schema specification of its format.
The example XML shows how it records the internal details of objects, including field types and inherited classes.
Even if you don’t use this schema yourself, it would give you a starting point for the issues to be addressed by a format in order to fully represent object state.