On 20 Mar 2015, at 13:03, David M. Lloyd <david.ll...@redhat.com> wrote: ... > An interesting aspect of this approach is that it deals with a problem in the > serialization spec [1] where it specifically says that serializable classes > should be reading/writing stream fields always, and before reading/writing > other data: > > In section 3.4: "Either ObjectInputStream's defaultReadObject or readFields > method must be called once (and only once) before reading any optional data > written by the corresponding writeObject method; even if no optional data is > read, defaultReadObject or readFields must still be invoked once." > > In section 2.3: "Either ObjectOutputStream's defaultWriteObject or > writeFields method must be called once (and only once) before writing any > optional data that will be needed by the corresponding readObject method to > restore the state of the object; even if no optional data is written, > defaultWriteObject or writeFields must still be invoked once." > > But classes (even JDK classes) often disregard this requirement, relying on > known implementation behavior and either reading/writing optional data before > fields or just not reading/writing fields at all. So either the spec should > be updated (I've tried to do this but nobody seems to know how to modify this > old content I guess) to match behavior, or the spec should be enforced more > strictly - however doing the latter *will* break a lot of user code, *unless* > an alternative readObject method is introduced with the more strict > enforcement. But I guess even in this case, the spec should be updated to > allow the implementation behaviour.
I do remember the thread on this [1]. I did try to locate the source of the Serialization spec, but never got to the bottom of it. I think we should start a new thread on this, and see if we can agree proposed wording for the spec. I will then endeavour to have these amendments applied to the spec. ( In the meantime I’ll see if I can make progress on locating the spec source ). -Chris. [1] http://markmail.org/message/tpyws22lklyodb7p > [1] > http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/platform/serialization/spec/serialTOC.html
