[Advanced-java] C-like structs?

[jboyd@xxxxxx (Jason Boyd)]

In C/C++, a common way to serialize data is to define a struct containing 
data in the exact packed format it would be on disk, and then (in 
pseudo-code) do this:

typedef struct MYDATA {
   int x, y;
   double wx, wy;
} * MYDATAptr;

MYDATA data; // ... fill with actual data

...

FILE file = open(filename);
file.write(data, sizeof(MYDATA));
file.close();

OR:

file.read(&data, sizeof(MYDATA));

Is there a way to do this in Java? That is, simply read from an input 
stream or write into an output stream the raw data of a class without 
having to write serialization code? 

The reason is that I need to read heavily nested legacy files (written by 
a C app) which are entirely based on this paradigm, and which use a *lot* 
of different struct types. 

Maybe I'm missing an obvious idiom, but I haven't seen a simple way to do 
this in Java... Anyone?

Jason