How to Make Object.class Type Generic

Question

I would like to create a utility method that takes two Objects as parameters and marshalls a XML from them. The below code works if I use the actual Object type for the from parameter, but how do I make this generic? The below wont compile since it can't resolve the from Object to a type. Any ideas?

 public static String getXML(Object from){
    StringWriter xml = new StringWriter();
    try {
      JAXBContext.newInstance(from.class).createMarshaller().marshal(from, xml);
    } catch (Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return xml.toString();
  }

Answer 1

You can get the Class instance of an object like so

JAXBContext.newInstance(from.getClass()) //...

This is explained in the Ojbect#getClass() javadoc.

Returns the runtime class of this Object.

Note that there aren't any generics directly involved in this code snippet.