As Oracle states, "A record declaration specifies in a header a description of its contents; the appropriate accessors, constructor, equals, hashCode, and toString methods are created automatically.

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.

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 ...