I've used Boost Fusion associative maps, in conjunction with a bit of glue code and an appropriate JSON or XML library, to provide pretty seemless serialisation

I've used Boost Fusion associative maps, in conjunction with a bit of glue code and an appropriate JSON or XML library, to provide pretty seemless serialisation and de-serialisation for both XML and JSON for a while. For XML it's a little tricky because you have to have a means of mapping the simple flat relationship between a struct and its fields, to the various relationships between XML elements, subelements, attributes, and CDATA etc. Here's an example of what my declarations for XML look like in some code I wrote last year. BOOST_FUSION_ADAPT_ADT ( xml_encoded<Description>, XML_ATTR (string, "summary") XML_TEXT (string) ) BOOST_FUSION_ADAPT_ADT ( xml_encoded<Event>, XML_ATTR (string, "name") XML_SUBTREE (shared_ptr<Description const>, "description") XML_ATTR (optional<unsigned>, "since") ) The #defines for each macro are short, and beyond Fusion there's only a small support header Here's a talk from CppConn describing a similar use case, but for binary data formats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbZdZKpUVeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbZdZKpUVeg