How to serialize an object to XML with dynamic element's attribute?

What would be a dynamic and flexible way to transform XML or Json to Java object?

• I am wondering that is there currently an API or a way to transform a XML or a JSON document into a Java object in a more dynamic and flexible way ? for example lets say this XML doesn't have the same element every time, sometimes it has 3 elements or sometimes it has 10 under the root. The naive way to implement it would be just manually hard-code all the possibilities in your java obj like in this case initialize all 10 instance variables, but I am looking for a more dynamic way that your obj can vary accordingly from xml document. In other words, if my XML document has 3 elements under the root then my java object would just have 3 instance variables.

• Answer:

  I am not quite sure whether this could resolve your issue, but I recommend you to use protocol buffer. It is more dynamic, robust and you can create a corresponding Java class, if you use its API - http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html