I often find myself writing the same boilerplate over and over for my basic persistence needs. My usual pattern is to serialize/materialize a class-side instance variable with accessors of the same name.
Some time ago, I added the following to SimplePersistence (IIRC it gets loaded by default):
aClass persist: #fieldName
which adds the necessary code automatically.
Since I've been playing with STON a bit, I created the same in STON-Tools and uploaded to
http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~SeanDeNigris/SeansOutbox. There is even a test ;)
Enjoy...
Cheers,
Sean