On 24 April 2017 at 09:27, Sebastian Laskawiec <slaskawi@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

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