Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Overview of this book

Get up to speed with Groovy, a language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that integrates features of both object-oriented and functional programming. This book will show you the powerful features of Groovy 2 applied to real-world scenarios and how the dynamic nature of the language makes it very simple to tackle problems that would otherwise require hours or days of research and implementation. Groovy 2 Cookbook contains a vast number of recipes covering many facets of today's programming landscape. From language-specific topics such as closures and metaprogramming, to more advanced applications of Groovy flexibility such as DSL and testing techniques, this book gives you quick solutions to everyday problems. The recipes in this book start from the basics of installing Groovy and running your first scripts and continue with progressively more advanced examples that will help you to take advantage of the language's amazing features. Packed with hundreds of tried-and-true Groovy recipes, Groovy 2 Cookbook includes code segments covering many specialized APIs to work with files and collections, manipulate XML, work with REST services and JSON, create asynchronous tasks, and more. But Groovy does more than just ease traditional Java development: it brings modern programming features to the Java platform like closures, duck-typing, and metaprogramming. In this new book, you'll find code examples that you can use in your projects right away along with a discussion about how and why the solution works. Focusing on what's useful and tricky, Groovy 2 Cookbook offers a wealth of useful code for all Java and Groovy programmers, not just advanced practitioners.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Groovy 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Serializing Groovy Beans to XML


In this recipe, we are going to learn how to serialize a Groovy Bean into XML and back. Groovy Beans are discussed in detail in the Writing less verbose Java Beans with Groovy Beans recipe from Chapter 3, Using Groovy Language Features. The steps from this recipe can be applied either to POJO or POGO.

Getting ready

Groovy doesn't have a default XML object serializer. The groovy.xml.MarkupBuilder is an excellent tool for generating XML in a fluent way but doesn't offer any simple mechanism to create an XML document out of bean properties.

There is, on the other hand, a large offer of third-party Java libraries for XML serialization. In this recipe, we are going to look at XStream (http://xstream.codehaus.org/). XStream is a very popular library, with frequent releases and a dead-simple API. Did we mention XStream is also fast and has a ridiculously low memory footprint?

How to do it...

The following steps offer an insight into how to achieve our task:

  1. Before we can...