Comments on: Beautiful Java: Reflection and the BeanCopier

By: stephan

stephan — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:42:34 +0000

Nice.

By: null

null — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:56:35 +0000

http://dozer.sourceforge.net/

By: How-to: copying an object with several ways « When IE meets SE

How-to: copying an object with several ways « When IE meets SE — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 07:09:15 +0000

[...] How-to: copying an object with several ways Published January 12, 2008 Java You may have this situation, you need to copy an object for some purpose. So you know the copy constructor but do you know how may ways to implement it? After I read Beautiful Java: Reflection and the BeanCopier, I complied those methods. Also you need to think about Law of Distributed Object Design: Don’t distribute your objects! and don’t distribute it!! [...]

By: stephan

stephan — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 11:27:59 +0000

I still don’t think xstream is faster than copying properties, I can’t see why it should.

And as I said, copying attributes to an object is something different than creating a copy of an object.

“There is another solution though - I think jboss have a similar object serialisation technology that would work similarly.”

If you’ve read the post, I wrote “JBoss provides a fast implementation of this technique.”

And yes, I have been using XStream in several projects.

And yes, I’ve said it is perhaps best to use Commons BeanUtils to copy properties.

:-)

By: ben

ben — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 09:11:43 +0000

XStream should be used by every java developer imho. It vastly simplifies copying of objects, serialisation, and is FASTER than normal serialisation without the drawbacks.

It could also be trivially enhanced to pass an object into it:

templateObject = new …
xstream.fromXml(templateObject, xml);

xstream.codehaus.org

There are many, many problems with doing your own approach - god knows I have tried. Its a large can of worms, as I am sure the xstream guys know.

There is another solution though - I think jboss have a similar object serialisation technology that would work similarly.

Lastly, if you want to restrict to beans, you can use the internal java classes xmlencoder,xmldecoder, but those are horrid imho.

By: stephan

stephan — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 08:29:22 +0000

Nice solution. But I guess it’s slower and more diffcult to understand for developers who don’t know xstream. It’s also more complex to configure. XStream is more robust though, you’re right. And of course your solution doesn’t copy properties but creates a new copy of an object. At least I would write a small wrapper with a copy copy method to change the semantics.

By: ben

ben — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 03:49:07 +0000

copy = xstream.fromXML(xstream.toXml(object));

Easier, faster, more robust.