Sent from my iPhone
On Sep 22, 2010, at 6:27 AM, Sean Owen <[email protected]> wrote:
Embedded in my question is, what is GSON used for at this stage? There
are potentially three serialization mechanisms in play (java.io,
Writable, GSON) and want to rationalize them. Is GSON still needed?
GSON is useful as an inspectable serialization. Avro would perhaps be
preferable but Writable and java native serialization are not because
of the need to inspect models using non java languages.
I am very sympathetic about the desire to rationalize these but the
way forward that I see is avro since it serves the purposes of the
other options. In particular, with large models gson begins to eat up
vast amounts of transient heap space when writing or reading. Avro
would avoid this.
(Could well be) 'transient' doesn't have meaning for Writable, though
I take the point about annotation. But an annotation or comment could
be a better thing. 'transient' in a non-Serializable class looks at
first like a mistake.
Except where it is meaningful to the compiler, I agree that transient
is less than perspicuous. Where it is used only for GSON there should
always be a comment about why.
On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 2:19 PM, Jeff Eastman
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 9/22/10 3:16 AM, Sean Owen wrote:
Someone remind me about why we use 'transient' in the code?
It has no meaning outside of java.io.Serializable, and customizing
its
behavior. It's not seen in non-Serializable classes.
But, I remember someone commented at one point that it has meaning
for
the GSON serialization mechanism. True?
If so, is there a sense of which classes that affects? since I see
it
in classes I don't think would ever be serialized like OnlineAuc.
Yes, Gson will not serialize transient state. It's also a
reasonable way to
indicate transient state that is not serialized by Writable. See
AbstractCluster for an example.
