On 02/14/11 14:17, Daniel Larimer wrote:
It seems to me that Boost.Serialization is only compatible with itself and even though it can 'read/write' to/from a XML or even a 'json' file, it gives you very little control over the resultant structure of the file, because it throws in version info, object graphs, etc. So attempting to implement a JSON RPC built on Boost.Serialization is difficult if you do not control both sides of the RPC.
Another example would be implementing a binary RPC protocol that must communicate with an embedded device that only supports C. It would be very difficult to craft specific byte streams from structs without knowing the internals of Boost.Serialization. It appears that the only option at the moment is to implement your own Archive.
Dan
I've used Boost.Serialization to implement several network interfaces where I had no control over the protocol format and had to craft an Archive class to adhere to the given standard. In my experience, this approach has been much cleaner and simpler than trying to write the marshaling code in each object. It's paid dividends when I have needed to save an object and can use the default text or xml Archives. The Serialization library has a macro |BOOST_CLASS_IMPLEMENTATION(my_class, boost::serialization::||object_serializable||) that will serialize the class using the serialize() function but add no extra class or version information. In this case, you know exactly what the serialized byte stream will look like at the expense of having to write a simple Archive class Brian|