If you are fortunate enough to be using JDK 7, the newly available Objects class is the obvious (at least to me) choice for implementing the “common” Java object methods such as equals (Object ...

One down side that occasionally manifests itself as an issue is the lack of toString (), equals (Object), and hashCode () method implementations in default JAXB-generated objects.

While languages like Ruby provide the pertinent information you need, why can't Java provide a decent, useable, toString() method right out of the box?