Question

Please provide more details or alternative approaches for this.

Please note: I am not overriding the clone method, also I will be grateful if anybody could explain if I should override the clone method and what the advantage would be.

Answer 1

It is not about performance, clone performance is OK. But you can clone only Cloneable objects, while Spring’s BeanUtils.copyProperties can copy properties of any JavaBean object (public no-args constructor and setter / getters for properties). E.g. this works fine copying properties of 2 objects of different classes

class X {
    String name;
    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }
    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }
}

class Y {
    String name;
    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }
    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }
}

public class Test1 {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        X x = new X();
        x.setName("test");
        Y y = new Y();
        BeanUtils.copyProperties(x, y);
        System.out.println(y.getName());
    }
}

and prints

test