Best way to save inventories?

How should one go about saving an inventory that is not associated with a player during a server shutdown/reload? I have tried using javax.persistence, which I use to create databases to save other information, but I couldn't get it to work with the Inventory class. I have seen code in which people have written their own save() and load() methods to save to a text/yaml file, but this seems reasonably long-winded, especially with item metadata. Is there a better way?

 

If you're willing to reference CraftBukkit, there's actually a simple and relatively short method for serializing ItemStacks:

• Serialize inventory to a single string and back

I've updated my inventory serialization to Minecraft 1.4.6:
https://gist.github.com/4342379

 

Thanks, this helps a lot! One quick question- does this work perfectly for data such as the contents of written books?

 

Yeah, everything that can be saved to the disk should work with that method.