Saving values of different types, with methods

Question

I was to save some configuration values. :) These values are might be defined in a xml file and might be of the types String, boolean, String[], ... or others. These values might be defined in a xml file. Is there a best practise way to save these values, together with their tagname in the xml file and a default value. I want to clean up some ultra bad legacy code, where things look like this:

    public static final String VIEWCOOKIE_MAXLENGTH_VALUENAME = "view_cookie_max_length";
    public static final int VIEWCOOKIE_MAXLENGTH_DEFAULT = 512;
    public static int viewCookie_maxLength = VIEWCOOKIE_MAXLENGTH_DEFAULT;

    Integer temInt = basic.getTimedBaseIntegerValue(basic.c_adclear_section, null,
    CookieValues.VIEWCOOKIE_MAXLENGTH_VALUENAME,
    CookieValues.VIEWCOOKIE_MAXLENGTH_DEFAULT, currentTime);
if (firstLoad || basic.checkParamChanged(0,CookieValues.VIEWCOOKIE_MAXLENGTH_VALUENAME,
CookieValues.viewCookie_maxLength, temInt))
    CookieValues.viewCookie_maxLength = temInt;

those lines for all values, and methods for all the different type.

Is there a better way like this:

public class Value<T> {

   String valueName;
   final T defaultValue;
   T value;
   Method method;
    ...
}

but I don't know if this is the best way and also I'm a little bit worried, because I don't want to slow down the server, due to all the Wrapppers. This problem is hard to search so I'm sorry if this has already been asked somewhere.

Answer 1

This might answer your question: What is the best way to convert a java object to xml with open source apis

Basically you have to use a Marshaller (something that converts an object to text and back), and there are tons of those for Java.