Question

So I am using a proprietary java library in a project which I don’t have access to source code.

It throws a Message object, and obviously I can’t implement Serializable. It’s generated throughout runtime.

what are my options? Is there a way to serialize the Message object into a byte array and back into the object?

UPDATE: I was able to serialize the object to JSON (http://code.google.com/p/json-io/) but couldn’t convert it back to an object as it returns null. So I am trying to convert it to byte array using the code below. Still not working.

public byte[] toByteArray (Object obj)
{
  byte[] bytes = null;
  ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
  try {
    ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(bos); 
    oos.writeObject(obj);
    oos.flush(); 
    oos.close(); 
    bos.close();
    bytes = bos.toByteArray ();
  }
  catch (IOException ex) {
    //TODO: Handle the exception
  }
  return bytes;
}

public Object toObject (byte[] bytes)
{
  Object obj = null;
  try {
    ByteArrayInputStream bis = new ByteArrayInputStream (bytes);
    ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream (bis);
    obj = ois.readObject();
  }
  catch (IOException ex) {
    //TODO: Handle the exception
  }
  catch (ClassNotFoundException ex) {
    //TODO: Handle the exception
  }
  return obj;
}

Answer 1

XStream is one way to go.