Support for Serialization and Externalization?

[Joe Gamache]

Hello,

We have been using  Avro successfully to serialize many of our objects, 
using binary encoding, for storage and retrieval.  Although the 
documentation about the Reflect Mapping states:
    This API is not recommended except as a stepping stone for systems 
that currently uses Java interfaces to define RPC protocols.
we used this mapping as that recommendation did not seem to apply.  We 
do not use the serialized data for RPC (or any other messaging 
system).    In fact, this part has in-place for a while and works 
exceptionally well.

Now we would like to "externalize" a smaller subset of the objects for 
interaction with a WebApp.  Here we would like to use the JSON encoding 
and the "specific" mapping.    We tried having this set of objects 
implement "GenericRecord", however, this then breaks the use of 
Reflection on these objects.  [The ReflectData.createSchema method 
checks for this condition.]

Can Avro be used to serialize objects one way, and externalize them 
another?  [The externalized objects are a subset of the serialized 
ones.]   Perhaps more generally, my question is: can both binary 
encoding and JSON encoding be supported on overlapping objects using 
different mappers?   If yes, what is the best way to accomplish this?

Thanks for any help - I am still quite a noob here so I greatly 
appreciate any additional details!

Joe Gamache