[Hibernate] XML serialization

[Anton v. S. <an...@ap...>]

> Is it
> a good feature but because I never documented it , nobody knows it works

I had seen indications that it existed, and you've referenced it in passing before, iirc, so I didn't realize it was as unofficial as all that.

> a good feature but because I never finished it (missing XML->objects), nobody can use it yet

Ah, but that assumes you need XML->objects.  I have another application in mind, and it may be useful for that.

> a useful feature but the wrong approach

Don't know enough about it yet.

> not really useful to anyone

I would think it has a lot of potential application-level uses.  Most databases these days have a way to get the output of a query as XML.  However, that requires writing the query in SQL.  Your feature has the makings of an equivalent for Hibernate.  One obvious way to use this is for reports, where XSLT or similar XML formatting tools could be used to transform the XML into HTML, PDF or whatever.  This has the potential to eliminate some application-specific code which might otherwise be needed, or at least replace some of that code with stylesheets, which may be simpler (although with XSL, one can't always be sure of that :)

I'm not just looking for ways to use a new feature just because it's there: in applications I'm working on, there's a fair amount of code devoted to generating XML.  I also have a primitive "view framework" which can render HTML views of arbitrary beans based on a metadata repository and a (typically small) view-specific specification.  Generation of XML as well as HTML was something I was planning to add to this framework.  I see some potential synergy here...

Anton