Software development. And stuff.

XStream is a simple object -> xml -> object serialization tool. There are many other tools that do similar things out there. Here are some of the features that distinguish it from the others:

* Very fast.
* Requires no custom mappings to be created.
* Can serialize objects that have private fields and non-default constructors.
* Handles arbitary objects and collections.
* Produces very clean XML; the kind a human would write.
* Does not duplicate any information in the XML that can be obtained via reflection.
* Decoupled from XML implementations. Use it with DOM, JDOM, DOM4J, or even non-XML streams (such as custom configuration objects, YAML or properties files).
* Open source, BSD license.

Here’s an example chunk of XML produced by XStream:

Joe
Walnes

123
1234-456


123
9999-999