What are the relative advantages of XMLEncoder and XStream?

Question

Suppose I want to store many small configuration objects in XML, and I don\'t care too much about the format. The XMLDecoder class built into the JDK would work, and from what I

Answer 1

I'd also prefer XStream as it is really easy to use and to extend. You can quickly start if you're going with the default setup. If you need to customize the behavior it has a very clean API and a lot of extension points, so you have really fine grained control over the things you want to tweak without interfering with other parts of the marshalling process.

As the XML that is created by XStream looks nice, manual editing is also simple. If the output doesn't fulfill your needs and the long list of available Converters doesn't contain the one you need, it's fairly simple to write your own.

A big plus is also the good documentation on their homepage.