Josh,
You're right that serialization can be a neat thing. The reason we haven't
done this (in public) in the past is that we don't want to _require_ that
clients link any special library. As it stands, you can write a client in
BASH or whatever, but you have to pack the structs the way we say. This
property remains if we specify a standard format such as XDR or the data
parts of MPI. Either of these would be fine by me, and you're likely to
find helper functions in your favourite language. Except maybe BASH.
Richard.
On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Josh Bers wrote:
> Brian,
>
> I am with you on moving towards a standard format for the data. I would
> recommend looking at how Java does object serialization. Basically all
> of your data types (structures that you want to send across a socket)
> are classes that implement readObject and writeObject methods. These
> methods take i/o streams as args (sockets, fd's, etc.) This way you can
> isolate the code for encoding to a single place. If you chose to use XDR
> then it could happen there. Alternatively you could use ASN.1 and BER or
> a custom method of your choosing: xml, ascii, etc.
> The nice thing about a serializable interface is that you can
> easily add versioning of the data formats to support backwards
> compatibility without making a mess of the code base. Then you could
> write future versions of player/stage that support older applications
> because they can read the older data formats.
>
> Josh
>
> -----------------Josh Bers-----------------
> email: jbers@... BBN Technologies
> phone: 617.873.4262 10 Moulton St.
> www: http://www.bbn.com Cambridge, MA 02138
>
>
>
>
>
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--
Richard Vaughan
Information Sciences Lab, HRL Laboratories LLC.
vaughan@... (310) 317-5689
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