Android: XML parsing thoughts, part 2

This is the second part of the article about XML parsing. The first part of it is available here.

In this post I want to tell you about one 3rd party XML handling lib that you may want to use in Android development.

It's Simple framework. Simple is a high performance XML serialization and configuration framework originally from Java world. But it can be used in Android too. It offers full object serialization and deserialization, maintaining each reference encountered.
So, what is the feature of Simple? Simple framework uses annotations to describe correspondence between Java objects and their XML representation in a declarative manner. As a result we have very demonstrable Java code without weird boilerplate stuff! :)







To use Simple in your Android project just add .jar file as a library (Project properties -> Java Build Path -> Libraries tab). Now you are ready! For example we need to parse XML like this:

<ninja>
   <name>Katakuna</name>
   <weapon type="melee">sword</weapon>
</ninja>

 No problems, it's easy! Just create Java class that describes ninja:

@Root(name="ninja")
public class Ninja
{
    @Element(name="name")
    public String name;
 
    @Element(name="weapon")
    public String weapon;
 
    @Attribute(name="type")
    public String weaponType;
}

Looks very demonstrable, isn't it? ;)

Finally deserialization is pretty simple:

Reader reader = new StringReader(xmlStream);
Persister serializer = new Persister();
try 
{
    Ninja ninja = serializer.read(Ninja.class, reader, false);
} 
catch (Exception e) 
{
    Log.e("XML with Simple demo", e.getMessage());
}

I think this small example has intrigued you with Simple framework! You can learn more about Simple framework features (which are so cool!) at tutorials and articles pages. Download it here (it's free and licensed under Apache license).

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