CLONE -Make an option to create primitive and String properties as attributes.

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.