Hi folks. I am really happy to announce that ESUG is sponsoring me for Fuel development through the ESUG SummerTalk. I am Martin Dias, a student at Buenos Aires, Argentina. The idea behind this SummerTalk is to implement Fuel, a binary, fast and general-purpose object graph serializer in <a href="http://www.pharo-project.org/">Pharo</a>. It is based on VisualWorks' Parcels ideas.<br>
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<br>Actually, the project has already started since several months. Tristan Bourgois and I started with the project while doing an internship with <a href="http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/web/pier" target="_blank">RMoD, INRIA</a>. Since a couple of months, <a href="http://marianopeck.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Mariano Martinez Peck</a> joined the team, and now he is the official mentor in the SummerTalk.<br>
<br>ESUG website for SummertTalk: <a href="http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Promotion/SummerTalk/SummerTalk2011" target="_blank">http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Promotion/SummerTalk/SummerTalk2011</a><br><br>The website with all the necessary information is here: <a href="http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/web/pier/software/Fuel" target="_blank">http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/web/pier/software/Fuel</a><br>
It even includes slides explaining the algorithm. In addition, a paper is in progress.<br><br>For the moment, Fuel already provides the following features:<br><br>- Fast pickle format. It is much faster to materialize than to serialize.<br>
- Correctly support class reshape (when the class of serialized objects has changed).<br>- Serialize ANY kind of object. For the moment there is no
object to our knowledge that we cannot serialize and materialize.<br>- Be able to completely serialize classes and traits (not just a global name).<br>- Support cycles and avoid duplicates in the graph.<br>
- Integration to <a href="http://www.moosetechnology.org/" target="_blank">Moose</a> with an extension to export and import their models.<br>- Detection of globals: for example if you serialize Transcript, it is not duplicated and instead managed as a global reference.<br>
- Solve common problems like Set rehash.<br>- Buffered writing: we use a buffered write stream for the serialization part (thanks Sven!).<br>
- No need of special support from the VM.<br>- Try to have a good object oriented design.<br>- Well tested (about 120 tests, for the moment).<br>- Large set of benchmarks (even benchmarks for Moose extension).<br><br>And of course, there are a lot features for the future. You can see some of them in the website and some in the issue tracker: <a href="http://code.google.com/p/fuel/issues/list" target="_blank">http://code.google.com/p/fuel/issues/list</a><br>
<br>We really appreciate all kind of feedback and comments. If you want to try it, check in the website how to do it. It is extremely easy. <br><br>Once again, I want to thank a lot to ESUG for sponsoring the project. I plan to create a "news" section in the website with some RSS. I will keep you informed.<br>
<br>Best regards,<br>Martin<br>
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