Re: [Simple-support] Just started -- some questions

[<Nia...@ub...>]

Hi,

I have added my answers under the associated questions.

> My compliments -- this is an amazingly well-done and professional
> software package.   I am considering using it for all my
> new code.

Great, glad you found it so useful.

> I did have a couple of questions which I haven't been able to answer 
> by reading the archives.
> 
> 1. Have there been any comparisons done between simple and Sun's
> XMLEncoder?   That's what I was looking at when I came
> across simple.   
> Are there things that XMLEncoder can do that simple can't, and are any

> of those things on the roadmap?

No, there should be nothing possible with XMLEncoder that simple can not
handle. Also simple can handle much more than XMLEncoder can in terms of
formatting and flexibility.

> 2. Why are @Commit and @Persist and @Complete implemented as 
> annotations rather than defining a java interface?

Because I did not want to intrude in to the developers object model.
Consider an existing POJO,you do not always want a public commit method
exposed, nor do you always want to add an interface. With annotations
you can annotate a private, perhaps existing, method. It will not affect
your object model and the user does not even know about it. Just
transparent serialization the whole way.

> 3. What is the preferred method for selective serialization?  What I 
> want to do is include some elements based on a runtime boolean 
> expression rather than always serialize them.

There are many, there is read resolve and write replace capabilities as
you would see in Java Object Serialization. Also the @Persist and
@Complete persister callbacks allow you to modify your object prior to
serialization and recover it after. Finally the Strategy object is the
central point of interception and manipulation in the framework. It will
allow you to do just about anything.

> 4. Is there any roadmap to providing a hook so you can control the 
> formatting of the XML output?  (Some of my planned applications might 
> have users looking at the XML files in an editor, and simple doesn't
> seem to limit line length.)   Also, it might be nice to be
> able to
> generate comment blocks in the output.

Well you have the Format object, this will control indentation. However
I have not included line wrapping, which I guess I could include in
future. Line wrapping could be done in a custom Writer that just inserts
new line characters if its tool long. As for comments, this is something
that needs to be added to the OutputNode object, so that you can write
comments to a given node.

Hope this helps
Niall
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