Unfortunately the new version of Hessian in the latest milestone has at least 
one significant bug.

   http://bugs.caucho.com/view.php?id=3920

Although I wouldn't classify Hessian as "abandoned", it is pretty close. The 
Caucho people only sporadically release new versions [1] only some of those 
versions randomly end up in maven. Commit messages are completely unhelpful [2] 
so it is hard to know what or why something changes. There are no release 
notes. We don't know if Hessian is impacted by the Java serialisation security 
issues uncovered last year [3] 

I'm prepared to put in some time (or more specifically delegate one of my team 
to spend some time) to come up with a resolution. We already have a workaround 
for the BigDecimal issue. But the question is, what should the Cayenne project 
do next?

1. I believe that trying to push patches upstream is futile. The developers 
don't respond to bugs or mailing list questions.

2. We could fork the Hessian project and create a "Cayenne serialiser" 
subproject. The licensing is all already APL. All we'd need to do is repackage 
and rename everything to avoid their trademarks. Do we have enough interest in 
our community to maintain such a thing?

3. Now that Dima has made ROP pluggable, work on integrating another technology 
like Google's protocol-buffers [4] or even use built-in Java serialisation.


I'm tending to like (3), but it could be substantial work.


How many developers here are using Hessian? Can we have a show of hands?

Has anyone here experience with other serialisers like protocol-buffers or 
thrift?

I know that Andrus has experience using json in his link-rest project, but I 
think that's too slow/large for ROP purposes. Still, it is very flexible.


Thoughts?
Ari



[1] http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.caucho/hessian
[2] https://github.com/ebourg/hessian/commits/git-svn
[3] 
https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/apache_commons_statement_to_widespread
[4] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3

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Aristedes Maniatis
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