[aerogear-dev] Object Serialization in iOS

[Christos Vasilakis]

Hi everyone,

we are currently working on updating our underlying networking library to rely on the AFNetworking 2.x branch. What is more interesting of this change, is that the new library supports the concept of ‘pluggable’ serializers, both in the request and in the response. In other words, a plugin a can be written (and attached) to automatically convert your object model to JSON (or XML, etc) and back, upon request/response. Although it could have been in earlier versions, it was a pain and hacky, making the new version attractable for this operation. Interesting enough, this spanked many projects[1][2] that take advantage of this ability.

Currently in iOS, we deal with generic dictionary objects, which although have their flexibility, I think it will make life easier for our developers, to make use of their object model directly during operations.

After the AFnet 2.x merge and our 1.5 release, what do you think on creating such a plugin and making necessary adjustments to our API?

Thanks,
Christos


[1] https://github.com/gonzalezreal/Overcoat 
[2] https://github.com/dcaunt/Sculptor