Currently, the xml XStream is created is quite straight forward and sometimes it is producing unnecessary tags for the object properties. For example:

class Student
{
  String name="blah";
  String lastname = "bloh";
}

public class School
{
   String name = "My school";
   int numberOfStudents = 1234;
   List students;
}

AFAIK, current XSteam is producing this XML for such classes (lets assume we make necessary aliases)

<school>
  <name>My School</name>
  <numberOfStudents>1234</numberOfStudents>
  <students>
    <student>
      <name>blah</name>
      <surname>bloh</name>
    </student>
    ....
  </students>
</school>

But if you make primitive and String (and perhaps StringBuffer) properties of a class as attributes of an xml element, resulting xml qould be much shorter. like:

<school name="My School" numberOfStudents="1234">
  <students>
    <student name="blah" surname="bloh" />
    ....
  </students>
</school>

i gues it does not disturb the background work of the XStream becuase there still is no configuration file whatsoever. only a set value like "MAKE_PRIMITIVES_ATTRIBUTES" would be enough for the user.