[infinispan-dev] More on marshallers - affects cache store authors again!

[Manik Surtani]

Guys

I've made a few changes regarding marshalling.

1) Removed Serializable/Externalizable where unnecessary.  There may  
well be more places where we can drop this interface - do let me know  
if I have missed anything.  The purpose of removing Serializable/ 
Externalizable is to force all serialization to go through the  
Marshaller interface, which is tuned for performance and reduced byte  
array size.

2)  Some classes relied on Object serialization.  Added marshall/ 
unmarshall methods for these.  E.g., Bucket.  Galder, you may want to  
do the same with your JBMAR externalizers.

3)  Moved (write|read)Unsigned(Int|Long) from MarshallerImpl to static  
helpers on org.infinispan.io.UnsignedNumeric so that they can be  
consumed from elsewhere as well, such as Galder's Externalizers.  Feel  
free to use these, they produce a more compact byte stream when  
serializing unsigned longs and ints, especially if their value is small.

4) Renamed ObjectStreamMarshaller - a dummy marshaller for testing -  
to TestObjectStreamMarshaller.  Also, this marshaller now uses XStream  
to write objects to an XML stream before writing the result to a JDK  
ObjectOutputStream.  The purpose is that the test marshaller can now  
deal with non-Serializable classes.  The XStream dependency is for  
tests only, as you would expect.

Please revisit how your cache store implementations use streams.   
Remember, never directly read to or write from a stream, use the  
marshaller instead!

Cheers
--
Manik Surtani
manik at jboss.org
Lead, Infinispan
Lead, JBoss Cache
http://www.infinispan.org
http://www.jbosscache.org