Ok,
I've been looking around at what's available for "improved data serialization" and the toolsets with robust communities (Castor, Hibernate, OJB) all seem to have this "mapping issue" (one needs to write/update mapping files in lockstep with coding).
As previously mentioned I want to try and develop a general "auto-mapper" but (as mentioned on this forum) the problem is rather ugly. I am curious if there are people interested in spawning off a new open-source project on this (I'll be working on one myself, and hopefully I'll get permission to make the code open source). Currently I'm thinking of using Java's Reflection API to figure out the necessary fields to save/load...
