Hi!
   In my project we created stub files for testing junits in java(factories) itself. However, we have to externalize these stubs. After seeing a number of serializers/deserializers, we settled on using XStream to serialize and deserialize these stub objects. XStream works like a charm. Its pretty good at what it claims to be. Previously, we had a single factory class say AFactory which produced all the stubs needed for testing different test cases. Now when externalizing each of the stub generated, we hit a road block. We had to create 1 xml file for each stub produced by the factory.
For example,

public final class AFactory{
     public static A createStub1(){ /*Code here */}
     public static A createStub2(){ /*Code here */}  
     public static A createStub3(){ /*Code here */}
}

Now, when trying to move this stubs to external files, we had to create 1 xml file for each stub created(A-stub1.xml, A-stub2.xml and A-stub3.xml). The problem with this approach is that, it leads to proliferation of xml stub files.

I was thinking, how about keeping all the stubs related to a single bean class in a single xml file.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<stubs class="A">
    <stub id="stub1">
      <!-- Here comes the externalized xml stub representation -->
    </stub>
    <stub id="stub2">
    </stub>
</stubs>

Is there a framework which allows you keep all the stub in xml representation in a single xml file as above ? Or What do you guys suggest should be the right approach to adhere to ?