[jibx-users] Why do we need a STATIC serializer ?

[Hervé Bitteur]

Hi, Yes, why do we need a STATIC serializer ? A static method makes sense for a deserializer since we don't have an instance at hand. But I don't understand this restriction for a serializer, because in that case we do have an instance ready. This gets more frustrating when dealing with enums of Java 5. Suppose we have an enum called Weekday. A natural deserializer is the pre-defined Weekday.valueOf(String), and it works OK. valueOf is pre-defined for every enum class. A natural serializer would be Weekday.toString(), which is NOT accepted by the binder since it is not static. Why ??? The workaround is to explicitly define a static method as follows : private static String serializer (Weekday day) { return day.toString(); } A bit awkward ... Who could explain this ? Bye /Hervé