[infinispan-dev] REST server, dealing with Serializable

[Sanne Grinovero]

On 24 April 2017 at 09:27, Sebastian Laskawiec <slaskawi at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hey Guys!
>
> I'm currently reworking REST interface and I'm scratching my head looking
> how we deal with Serializable [1][2].
>
> The scenario assumes that server knows that cache stores a Serializable
> instance and moreover, it knows how to deserialize it (and convert it to
> XML/JSON, but that's the trivial part). I might be wrong, but I think both
> assumptions are questionable if not wrong. At first, how to distinguish a
> serialized instance of a class the server received [3] from a standard byte
> array? I can imagine someone using "Content-type:
> application/x-java-serialized-object" but it's very error prone. It also
> leads to the question number two - how the server will know that type of
> instance it is? This knowledge is essential for deserialization.
>
> I think the serialization/deserialization should be really done on the
> client side (but as I mentioned before, maybe I don't see some important
> use cases). I would like to remove it from refactored REST server.
>

​To answer this specific question: the server needs to be able to serialize
/ deserialize the objects for many reasons.
Among these we have:
 - compatibility mode
 - "transcoding" among different clients expecting different types
 - indexless queries (read and compare specific fields)
 - indexed queries (index specific fields)
 - firing events​ (on anything more useful else than "blob was changed")
 - avoid losing the data when encoding schemes are updated (e.g. an
Infinispan update which includes improvements / fixes on the serialized
representation )

It's probably not an exhaustive list as I didn't follow this subject
closely, but I guess there are enough reasons there to clarify why just
encoding/decoding at the client side is not good enough.

Thanks,
Sanne




>
> What do you think?
>
> Thanks,
> Sebastian
>
> [1] https://github.com/infinispan/infinispan/blob/
> master/server/rest/src/main/java/org/infinispan/rest/Server.java#L267-L313
> [2] https://github.com/infinispan/infinispan/blob/
> master/server/rest/src/test/java/org/infinispan/rest/
> IntegrationTest.java#L636-L639
> [3] Note that the input param here is byte[]
> https://github.com/infinispan/infinispan/blob/master/server/
> rest/src/main/java/org/infinispan/rest/Server.java#L458
> --
>
> SEBASTIAN ŁASKAWIEC
>
> INFINISPAN DEVELOPER
>
> Red Hat EMEA <https://www.redhat.com/>
> <https://red.ht/sig>
>
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