On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 10:56 PM, G, Benjamin (NSN - IN/Bangalore) wrote:

I have a server which provides configuration to different clients. This server uses boost’s serialization to serialize the C++ configuration objects. Some of my clients don’t want to use boost for the (de-)serialization work.

Will this cause any issues? Can any client deserialize the data serialized by a boost-using entity? What are the things that I need to take care of?

I did read somewhere that boost serialization should be portable (I wonder if it means the same).

Boost serialization being portable means it is portable across platforms. Someone could theoretically create their own non-boost system to deserialize it, however the boost version does a lot of things like pointer tracking and so forth. The binary format is actually rather straightforward, however there are a *lot* of things that make it up. If you wanted something that would be easy to implement without boost, you might look at the Google Protocol Buffer library as that is what it is designed for.