Quoting Rickard Öberg <[email protected]>:
That said, if the serializing process is extracted from the runtime,
then it would be easy to instantiate a serializer and use streaming
serialization instead of producing a String, so that might cover the
more advanced cases.
/Rickard
I have developed a language-independent (de)serialization framework,
which basically produces almost the same serialization results as
Apache Avro [1]. I require this framework for my thesis, and Avro was
no good since it can't (de)serialize objects without schema. Of
course, this requirement is not important for this usecase with Qi4j
entitystores. However, my framework has much better API (IMO) than
Avro, and it only concerns serializing, and not implementing whole
protocols and whatnots.
For a long time, I had idea of asking Core people to make
serialization process customizable, so I could plug in my framework
into it. I thought of doing it later this year, but it seems now is
the time. However, I am not sure if my framework is yet available for
public use, and I will ask around about it and let you know.
I'll give you a little idea of how it would work, in my mind
currently. There would be a special EntityTypeSchemaService, which
would create a Schema (like in Avro) for each entity type needed. To
enable versioning, the entity store would need to have its own
meta-section, where the schemas for each version would be kept. So,
when the entity store of application version X encounters (in the
store) entity of version Y and type Z, it would simply look up in the
meta-section the schema for entity type Z of version Y to deserialize
it.
As a result, the entities would be serialized very very compactly. Of
course, the debugging would be much harder then, since the
serialization would be pure binary. However, my framework can be
easily extended to produce JSON or XML or some other output.
So, if you're interested, give me a yell and I'll ask around for availability.
[1] http://avro.apache.org/
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