[kaffe] Re: Serialization

[Brian Jones]

Guilhem Lavaux <guilhem at kaffe.org> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> I nearly managed to get Classpath's serialization up to kaffe's
> level and at the same time keeping the advantage of it. However, it
> is "nearly".
> 
> However I cam across an RMI's documentation which says
> serialPersistentFields should only be used for writing objects and
> not reading them.

It's kind of weird, as I recall initially people were supposed to
support older versions of a serialized object by checking the
serialVersionUID and if/else if/etc. the read/write object code.  This
seems to say another method is to always use the older serialized form
and translate to/from it using serialPersistentFields, the advantage
being a newer version could be used by an older version.

I intend to work on verifying serial compatibility with JDK 1.1
through 1.4 (maybe 1.5 beta) in the next couple of months, but I maybe
should hold off until the framework is working as intended.  I have
code that instantiates serializable classes and serializes to XML or
normal serialized representation.  Comparing via diff isn't that hard
on the XML afterward.  Testing that Classpath's libraries can in fact
read the serialized forms is also not too difficult.  I might should
spend time making it easy to run as a suite of tests.

Brian
-- 
Brian Jones <cbj at gnu.org>