Homemade vs. Java Serialization

Question

I have a certain POJO which needs to be persisted on a database, current design specifies its field as a single string column, and adding additional fields to the table is not a

Answer 1

How about the standard JavaBeans persistence mechanism:

java.beans.XMLEncoder
java.beans.XMLDecoder

These are able to create Java POJOs from XML (which have been persisted to XML). From memory, it looks (something) like...

You have to provide PersistenceDelegate classes so that it knows how to persist user-defined classes. Assuming you don't remove any public methods, it is resilient to schema changes.