Justin left a comment about various tools for generating Java code from XML. Last week while I was reading about Hibernate I was interested to read that the same files you use to persist POJO’s to a database using Hibernate can be used to create the Java objects as well. It’s reasonably well documented on the hibernate site, but doesn’t include all the classes you need on the classpath, so here’s an example from my system:

java -cp C:\hibernate\hibernate-2.1\hibernate2.jar;
C:\hibernate\hibernate-extensions-2.1\tools\hibernate-tools.jar;
C:\hibernate\hibernate-2.1\lib\commons-collections.jar;
C:\hibernate\hibernate-2.1\lib\commons-logging.jar;
C:\hibernate\hibernate-extensions-2.1\tools\lib\jdom.jar net.sf.hibernate.tool.hbm2java.CodeGenerator Resource.hbm.xml

where Resource.hbm.xml looks likes this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE hibernate-mapping
 PUBLIC "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Mapping DTD//EN"
 "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-mapping-2.0.dtd">
<hibernate-mapping package="com.mycompany" auto-import="false">
 <class name="Resource" table="resource">
  <id name="id" type="int" unsaved-value="0" >
    <column name="id" sql-type="int" not-null="true"/>
    <generator class="identity" />
   </id>
   <property name="label" type="string" />
   <property name="filename" type="string" />
   <property name="teaser" type="string" />
   <property name="type" type="string" />
   <property name="url" type="string" />
   <property name="datetimecreated" type="date" />
   <property name="datetimemodified" type="date" />
   <property name="createdby" type="string" />
   <property name="modifiedby" type="string" />
   <property name="active" type="integer" />
   <property name="archive" type="integer" />
 </class>
</hibernate-mapping>

This will automatically create a JavaBean, with full and empty constructors, getters and setters for all the fields, a toString() method, an equals() method, and a hashCode() method. Additionally, you can use an external configuration file to add an interface that the bean implements, change the rendering mechanism, the package, etc.

Cooler still, you can go backwards and create Hibernate mapping files directly from your existing compiled classes using the net.sf.hibernate.tool.class2hbm.MapGenerator.