在网站上存储用户首选项的最佳方法？（不仅是字符串输入）

Question

Lets say I want to store user preferences, but they aren't just string and integer preferences. Some of them are say java objects such as Color, JFreeChart chart settings, etc. What is the best way to do that? Would YAML be an option and just serialize that data into the application? I want to avoid having to write translation code converting strings into java objects. Thanks.

Answer 1

An option is to use XStream .

It's easy to use, needs no external config* and converts Java objects to/from XML or JSON.

*If you want to make the serialized preferences more portable or readable, you will need a couple of annotations. But if the objective is just to serialize/deserialize Java objects into/from a roughly human-readable format, you don't even need annotations.

Answer 2

You can use some standard object-to-string mappings like XML or JSON. That way you just use a 3rd party library to do the conversion (no need to write your own)

Answer 3

Where do you want to store your preferences? If they will go to a DB, use a ORM. If serializing them to a file is good enough, you can use XStream as biziclop suggests, and it can serialize to JSON and XML