RE: Serialization consternation

[Christopher J. Mackie]

Paul;  You asked specifically for Objective-C code, so I'm not sure this is
responsive, but there are many treatments of serialization in Java, at
various levels of detail and sophistication.

As you point out, one of the difficulties of managing serialization is how
'deep' to serialize within an object.  I'm not at all sure how to manage it
in Objective-C, but I it's almost certainly easier in Java, where
'Serializable' is a standard interface, and you can specify which fields to
serialize (and how, to some degree).

Take a look at:

http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/1.3/docs/guide/serialization/spec/serialTOC
.doc.html

There are comparable docs for Java 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4--just change the jdk
version number in the URL.

See also http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/excerpt/JavaRMI_10/index.html,
which is a tutorial introduction to serialization.

I suspect that even if you want to implement in Objective-C, understanding
serialization in Java will be (a) easier, and (b) helpful in formulating
your design for the Objective-C 'do-it-yourself' version.

Sorry I can't help more.  If you get it worked out, I suspect many of us
would welcome a brief synopsis of your findings and a look at your
source-code.  I'm interested in pursuing serialization on the way to
thinking about distributed Swarms, but I'm not there yet.

Best, --Chris Mackie

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden
[mailto:address@hidden Behalf Of Paul E Johnson
Sent: Friday, February 22, 2002 4:15 PM
To: swarm-support
Subject: Serialization consternation


I never heard the term serialization before Alex Lancaster mentioned it
to me and he wrote the section in the Swarm User Guide about it. Marcus
Daniels has written some working example code that can write and load
scheme/LISP formatted files and I can understand most of that.  But I
think there is some philosophical element I'm missing in how one does
serialization on a big project, as opposed to a simple working example.

Some people ( N>1 ) have tried to explain this to me, but since my
examples don't work the way I expect, I was hoping someone had done this
in an Obj-C Swarm program(or knows somebody who has)  so I could see
their example.


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