[infinispan-dev] reusing infinispan's marshalling

[Mircea Markus]

On Feb 3, 2014, at 6:24 PM, Galder Zamarreño <galder at redhat.com> wrote:

> Not sure I understand the need to compare this.
> 
> JBMAR and ProtoStream are solving different problems. The former is focused on getting the best out of Java persistence. The latter is focused on serializing stuff in a plattform independent way.
> 
> IMO, it’s not an apples to apples comparison.

AFAIK the only thing JBMAR does and proto doesn't is tracking circular references: e.g. person has a reference to address which has a reference to the same person instance. That comes at a performance cost (I guess an IdentityMapLookup per serialized object), though and for many users tracking circular dependencies is not needed, because of their data model. My expectation is that ISPN+protostram will be faster than ISPN+JBMAR because:
- protostream doesn't track circular references (AFAIK this is something that can be disabled in JBMAR as well)
- protostream allows for partial deserialization, that is only deserialize a specific attribute of a class

On top of that, it is platform independent, so if you start using it as the default serialization format, it will be easier for you to use ISPN from multiple platforms.

The drawback protostream has over JBMAR is that it requires one to define, besides the serialized, a protofile. Las time we discussed, Adrian had some ideas on how that can be circumvented, though.

IMO, in certain deployments makes sense to use protostream over JBMAR even when serializing only java objects and this benchmark would be a good tool to validate that.

Cheers,
-- 
Mircea Markus
Infinispan lead (www.infinispan.org)