Java XStream with HashMap

Question

I want to use XStream to convert a java hash to a json hash. I feel like this should be easier than it seems. What I'm looking for is a way to make:

Map<String, String> map = new HashMap<String, String>();
map.put("first", "value1");
map.put("second", "value2");

become

{'first' : 'value1', 'second' : 'value2' }

The closes I have converts it into a series of arrays.

XStream xstream = new XStream(new JettisonMappedXmlDriver() {
    public HierarchicalStreamWriter createWriter(Writer writer) {
        return new JsonWriter(writer, JsonWriter.DROP_ROOT_MODE);
    }
});

xstream.toXML(map);

which becomes

[["first", "value1"], ["second", "value2"]]

I feel like converting a java hash to json hash should be straight forward. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

The thing is that XStream is first and foremost designed to marshal and unmarshal Java objects to XML, JSON being just an afterthought, it most certainly has the least elegant support.

The technical problem being that as XStream must support both - XML and JSON formats, JSON map representation suffers, as there is no native way to represent a map-like structures in XML.