(The paper was indeed just updated a couple of days ago). On 08 May 2012, at 13:29, Göran Krampe wrote:
> - In general I believe in 99% of the cases the parsing system has to know > what it is parsing, how the JSON looks and how it should be mapped onto > objects. Making the JSON parser itsy bitsy smarter with type annotations > doesn't help me there, I still need to know that I want to instantiate a > PDFPage and put this Rectangle into it - but oh, perhaps not as a Rectangle, > but perhaps as two points sent into a class side instantiation message or > something. > > My point being that the type annotations doesn't "buy me" enough. (Just for the sake of the argument, I don't want to convince you) STON *does* buy you that: as long as we are talking about 'domain level objects' (a vague notion I agree) your Smalltalk object will serialize without any extra effort (see the ZnResponse example in the paper). You can customize some objects if you want to (mostly for readability, sometimes to fix some issue). Object implements #toSton: and #fromSton: by iterating over the instances variables. The issues are: Blocks, Classes and the fact that ephemeral instances are always serialized. Sven
