December 17th, 2007 | by matthew.wells |
OK, so you’re washed up on a desert island and not a broadband connection in sight. Assuming you have the know-how to craft a half decent Java platform out of the flotsam and jetsam on the beach, what are the downloads that you always carry on your flash drive for just such an occasion?
I’ll be a bit more specific. As Java’s my thing, I’m thinking of those open source gems that I really would not want to have to code again from scratch, even if I could, under any circumstances (although I can think of worse circumstances than under a coconut palm on a beach!)
Right at the top of my list, I would have to put xstream. In their own words:
XStream is a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again.
I’ve been using this library for about 3 years, mainly to support the reading, writing and upgrading of configuration files for configurable systems. I initially used it to enable me to add configurable functionality into a prototype system very rapidly, but it was so effective that I saw no reason to change the approach in the production system. If you are taking an object-centric approach to XML then I can see no reason to use anything else.
In the early days the emphasis was on ease of use (which was and still is stunning!), but subsequent releases have provided much more flexibility in the way that objects graphs can be mapped to XML schemas. I’m still a big fan and the library has become an essential part of my toolkit for implementing configurable systems.