On Fri, Feb 01, 2008 at 10:43:51 +0000, Ciaran wrote: > I guess Tomash' suggestion would allow someone who did want to work that > way to use their own handler/transcoder/(de)serialiser to delegate between > the mixed types based on something local to their application/platform ?
It will not (native format is unpredictable, so you can't judge from some first magic bytes), but I think this is not a problem. If the goal would be to simultaneously support some clients that use only native format, and some that use common, this would be no different from requesting to support interaction with clients each using its own format, and we are back to encoding used serialization method in flags. If you want interaction among several clients, the requirement should be to use the same serialization technique, no exceptions. If all clients are from the same language family, you may use native, otherwise you have to use common. -- Tomash Brechko
