Disadvantages of XMLEncoder & XMLDecoder?

Hello Experts,

Please advice me on this one. I have a fairly big object that is populated on the client side, with input from a <form>. We want to transmit it over the network to be received by the server (the form has around 80 fields or more). Our current approach is using the XMLEncoder, to convert the object to XML and sending it over the network. On the server end we use the XMLDecoder to do the conversion back to the object again, and save it to the DB and stuff...

The information being transmitted is kind of critical so I wanted to know if there are any known bad issues concerning this type of transformation concerning this two classes? Maybe data gets corrupted or somethings? Please advice...

(Just for your information: The data is being sent via a Post request)

And also, is there a way to get kind of a checksum of the object being transmitted to be able to check it back on the server to verify integrity? (maybe this could deserve another question)

Attached is the code from our current approach.

Start Free Trial

1:
2:
3:
4:
5:
6:
7:
8:
9:
10:
11:
12:
13:
14:
15:
16:
17:
18:
19:
20:
21:
22:
23:
24:
25:
26:
27:

//obtaining the XML for transmission
	public static String toXML(Object bean) {
 
		String XMLBean = "";
		ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
 
		// Create XML encoder.
		XMLEncoder xenc = new XMLEncoder(baos);
 
		xenc.writeObject(bean);
		xenc.flush();
		xenc.close();
		XMLBean = baos.toString();
		return XMLBean;
	}
 
//obtaining object from XML
	public static Object fromXML(String XMLBean) {
		byte[] buffer = XMLBean.getBytes();
		ByteArrayInputStream bais = new ByteArrayInputStream(buffer);
 
		// Create XML decoder.
		XMLDecoder xdec = new XMLDecoder(bais);
 
		// Read object.
		return xdec.readObject();
	}