"Kasun Indrasiri" <kasun147@gmail.com> writes:
Hi all, I'm interested in the Boost JSON archive for Boost.serialization project which is presented in the GSoC2008. I have had good exposure to C/C++ during my academic life and projects in the past. The main motivation to select the JSON archive project is that I have developed a JSON parser for Apache AXIS2/C web service engine and I successfully completed the project. In that case the parser was written in C but the task was similar to the requirements of the Boost.serialization. Therefore I would like to contribute to the Boost C++ community through my project.
It is important to realize that Boost Serialization, even when it uses e.g. the XML archive format, is not designed to produce archives that conform to any particular format/schema. In particular, the only real guarantee is that stream produced by serialization can be read back by de-serialization if the same (or a compatible) version of Boost Serialization is used and a compatible sequence of serialization instructions is used. In the case of the XML archive format, the file produced by serialization happens to conform to XML syntax, but that fact is nearly irrelevant as in all likelihood the archive will still be easily readable neither by humans nor by any external tools (except for trivial tools that merely display the XML structure). Thus, it is not clear what advantage a JSON-format archive would offer. The most obvious use for JSON is for communicating with a program written in JavaScript, but then it would be necessary to follow a particular format so that the JavaScript program could do something useful with the data, and therefore Boost Serialization is not the right tool for the job. -- Jeremy Maitin-Shepard