[infinispan-issues] [JBoss JIRA] Commented: (ISPN-508) ProtoBuf as portable serialization for Hot Rod

[ https://jira.jboss.org/browse/ISPN-508?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.sys... ] Galder Zamarreno commented on ISPN-508: --------------------------------------- I've been playing around with protobufs trying to figure out whether it could be used as a general marshalling mechanism and I don't think that's really possible. The problem with protobufs is that reading requires strongly type access to the class you're trying to deserialize, i.e. Person.parseFrom(bytes) (http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/javatutorial.html). In the java world u could get around adding class name to generated bytes and then using reflection on the reading part, but this won't fly with Python or C++. Partial incomplete solutions to this problem include using cache generic information to find out key/value types but this is not a guarantee and it's not clear to me how these would be translated to Python or C++ client impls. Protobufs also offers the possibility of using self describing messages but the API to build the read object is not available for Python (see bottom of: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/techniques.html), so this is not option in my opinion. So, my conclusion of protobufs is that clients would need to do the work of transforming their pojos to byte[] and pass them to us, and they'd parse the the byte[] from remote cache with the knowledge of the type to be read. In this scenario, we'd offer some guidelines via a wiki or similar to anyone wanting to do this. Next I'll check Thrift and Avro in greater detail to see if they offer a better solution than protobufs. -- This message is automatically generated by JIRA. - If you think it was sent incorrectly contact one of the administrators: https://jira.jboss.org/secure/Administrators.jspa - For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira