My team attempts to steer in a more domain-driven direction, and having “view” logic such as OXM in a “model” class in the middle of my domain breaks the single-responsibility principle. Now my domain objects do their job, as well as “display” themselves.

You could, for example, do like raveman suggested and make the Annotations more “magic”. But should you? Alternatively, XStream allows programatic description of the XML mappings. I could, instead, create a class whose job it is to know how a particular domain aggregate maps to XML. Then, if I wanted a second mapping, all I have to do is create a second class. Assuming I’m using dependency injection, I now just have to ensure the right XML Generator is being injected to the right places, and my system doesn’t have to worry about it.

I find this pattern far easier to understand and maintain, and in my experience newcomers to a project seem to have an easier time too.

Annotations for things like OXM (object XML mapping) or ORM (object relational mapping) are inappropriate in my opinion for the reason Travis highlighted. You want to reuse your domain objects and these types of annotated mappings limit the reuse in certain circumstances.

JPA for instance allows one to override the mapping annotations while JAXB does not.

That said, it can be a fairly subjective argument.