I just created this issue: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TINKERPOP-1391
As part of TINKERPOP-1278, I'd went ahead with deprecating the old method of sending a Traversal to the server. The approach taken there was to use java serialization to ship the Traversal to the server. The more I work on this though, the more it just looks like dead code that we really don't need to keep for any reason at all. Deprecation isn't really helping anyone out in this case as there are no drivers (save TinkerPop's gremlin-driver) that support this capability which is now wholly replaced by Bytecode serialization. Users won't know the difference as it is at a lower level of their concern and third-party drivers will be unaffected because they couldn't really support this "undocumented feature" anyway outside of the JVM. So, with all that reasoning, I'd just like to remove it all together and make some code look cleaner in the driver and server. The java serialization approach was a good experiment that helped lead us to the Bytecode solution and I think that's all it was ever really good for. Unless there are objections, I'll assume lazy consensus in 72 hours (Monday, August 1, 2016, 8:30am EST) and move forward with dropping it out. Thanks, Stephen
