I often find myself needing a quick ( in terms of code ), lightweight ( in term of runtime, dependencies) persistence solution for simply a bunch of objects, mainly between application restarts.
Usually I resort to some Java serialisation hack, but I wonder if there's something better out there.
Have you used something similar?
To make it clear, a JPA-based solution is not lightweight in my book, and a JDBC-based one is not quick.
Update: I favour configuration-less frameworks over those which require configuration. For instance the Java serialisation solution requires a implements Serializable and it works. A JPA solution, either with annotations or with mapping files would be too heavyweight.
Update 2: Just to make it clear, I don't think Serialisation is a hack. It's actually a very powerful mechanism, just that I'm using it in a hackish way when doing persistence.
I prefer XStream, a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again. Only one Jar needed, fast and very easy to use.