[kaffe] DefaultSerialization

[Stuart Ballard]

Patrick Tullmann wrote:
> 
> I wouldn't be surprised, though, if the approach of using an inner
> class called DefaultSerialization has gone stale, and there are now
> better ways of making Kaffe's Hashtable compatible with Suns.
> 
> Does anyone remember if Sun's VM ever at any point included a
> "DefaultSerialization" inner class which was magical?  (I checked
> JDK1.4 and JDK1.3 --- just by using reflection, mind you. :)
> 
> I guess I'll try "fixing" Hashtable to not use this magic inner class
> (and still be compatible with Sun's serialized classes).  This
> exercise will probably make the motivation for DefaultSerialization
> obvious...

My guess is that these classes date back to when JDK1.1 was common. 
IIRC, at that point the only available serialization technique was to 
implement Serializable (and have your private instance variables 
directly yanked out from under you and dumped to disk) or to implement 
Externalizable (in which case you were responsible for absolutely 
everything you wanted to read and write for serialization). In that kind 
of a world, you really do need some magic if you want to be compatible 
with Sun without having to have the exact same private variables used in 
the exact same way.

I don't believe that "DefaultSerialization" was ever magic for Sun, but 
I do believe that Sun only started offering anything magical with 
JDK1.2's release. In the (fairly long) interim between serialization's 
introduction with 1.1 and the release of 1.2, Kaffe would have naturally 
needed some magic of its own.

Anyone feel like doing some CVS archeology and finding out when 
DefaultSerialization was introduced in Kaffe, and trying to determine 
which JDK release was current at the time?

Stuart.


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Stuart Ballard, Programmer
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