[Seaside] ESUG SummerTalk - Fuel, binary object serializer

[Mariano Martinez Peck]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Runar Jordahl <runar.jordahl at gmail.com>wrote:

> Interesting project. There are so many uses for object serializers.
>

Yes! We are trying to enumerate them for a paper, so if you can help ;)


> Personally I am looking at storing objects in NoSQL databases, and
> serializing them is an option that will work in a lot of cases.


What would you need as an output of the serializer? a ByteArray ?


> Using
> a serializer for copying objects is also useful.
>

Yep, I think it was Colin who told us he was using his serializer as a
deepCopy :)


>
> Does Fuel support “cutting off” instance variables, like SIXX’s
> Object>>sixxIgnorableInstVarNames ?
>

Not so easily for the moment, but definitely something we will do in the
future.
In fact, we have already an issue for that:
http://code.google.com/p/fuel/issues/detail?id=6
We call them "transient" instance variables. And we want to to extend them
to classes also (so their instances should be ignored as well)


>
> I always thought SIXX
> (http://www.mars.dti.ne.jp/~umejava/smalltalk/sixx/index.html ) was
> state-of-the-art in this field.


mmmmmmmm


> It seems to have many features, and it
> is supported on many dialects.  Are your ideas so great that it really
> makes sense to create yet another serializer?


It is not mostly our ideas, we based our work on VisualWorks Parcels. Of
course, we changed several things but the idea of the pickling format is
from there.


> Wouldn’t improving SIXX
> be better?
>
>
Because we DON'T want to use text based serializers. It is impossible to get
real speed with a text based serializer. We want to be really fast, that's
our main goal.
Try to use SIXX to export a Moose model for example. I recommend you to take
a chair.

So....purposes and goals are different. Our mail goal is speed, and mostly,
materializing speed. That's why we are using a particular pickle format.

Cheers


-- 
Mariano
http://marianopeck.wordpress.com
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