[jdom-interest] TODO serialization [eg]

[Dennis Sosnoski]

Externalizable is the cleanest way of handling this since it bypasses the reflection
otherwise used by serialization. I don't know where you saw the reference to PDF or
such, Joe, but this isn't true - when Externalizable is implemented by a class the
class identifier is still written and read by the serialization code, but the class
writeExternal/readExternal methods are used for everything else. These methods are
called with the ObjectOutput/ObjectInput instance and can use all the standard method
supplied by these interfaces.

Extending it is no problem - the subclass needs to do it's own work in writeExternal,
then call the superclass method, and reverse the process in readExternal.

For best overall performance you'd probably want to write and read names (elements,
attributes, namespaces, etc.) as String objects, using the writeObject/readObject
methods of ObjectOutput/ObjectInput; that way there'd only be a single copy of the
name text in the serialized form, with references to it when it's reused (this
assumes that the name Strings are reused, which I know at least some parsers do).
Attribute values and content data Strings could be written/read as UTF text (using
writeUTF/readUTF) to avoid the bookkeeping overhead of serialization.

This would give a several times speed improvement for serialization, while also
significantly reducing the serialized form size. It'd also be considerably more
compact than the actual XML.

  - Dennis

Dennis M. Sosnoski
Sosnoski Software Solutions, Inc.
http://www.sosnoski.com

Joseph Bowbeer wrote:

> Alex Rosen writes:
>
> > Isn't that what Externalizable is for?
>
> According to the magic spec, Externalizable is what you'd extend if you
> wanted to use something like PDF or XML as the serialization format.  I
> don't think Externalizable is easy to extend in a subclass (i.e., it's all
> or nothing), but I'm not sure about that.
>
> The writeObject method, on the other hand, is passed an ObjectOutputStream,
> which provides the powerful defaultWriteObject extensibility mechanism, as
> well as a set of convenient write* methods.
>
>   http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.3/docs/guide/serialization/
>
> ----- original message -----
> From: Alex Rosen arosen at silverstream.com
> Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 09:59:03 -0400
>
> > Hiding the implementation from the serialized form is a matter of
> > declaring most if not all fields transient and adding some custom
> > code to the readObject and writeObject methods.
>
> Isn't that what Externalizable is for? That way you don't have to remember
> to make all fields transient. Or is there something in this magic book that
> says that Externalizable is bad? :)
>
> _______________________________________________
> To control your jdom-interest membership:
> http://lists.denveronline.net/mailman/options/jdom-interest/youraddr@yourhost.com