Java: Merge 2 “beans” to produce a new one

Question

I need to take all the fields and collections from Bean1 and Bean2, sometimes apply some business logic, and produce Bean3 (all beans are hibernate/domain objects of the same type with a reasonably complex graph).

Any thoughts on how to do this? Done something similar in the past?

My ideas:

1. Dozer (http://dozer.sourceforge.net/)
2. BeanUtils (http://commons.apache.org/beanutils/)
3. Handrolled solution
4. A.N.Other cool solution?

Any recommendations?

Answer 1

Dozer is a nice bean mapping tool. However, it won't perform any business logic, of course.

I should not be a problem to implement a business logic and to rely on Dozer for bean mapping. This is what I would do.

Answer 2

Neither of the tools provides business logic - also it has to be implemented somehow. Bean utils are goot to access bean properties with standard notation. You may try groovy to implement business logic with nice syntax.