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Serialization and XML

Serialization and XML. Pat Palmer 2.0. What is serialization?. “The process of converting an object (or a graph of objects) into a linear sequence of bytes for either storage or transmission to another location.” . What is deserialization?.

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Serialization and XML

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  1. Serialization and XML Pat Palmer2.0

  2. What is serialization? “The process of converting an object (or a graph of objects) into a linear sequence of bytes for either storage or transmission to another location.”

  3. What is deserialization? “The process of taking in stored information and recreating objects from it.” • Wikipedia currently has a decent overview of serialization • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serialization

  4. how to deserialize badly • If a program is both the serializer and deserializer, things are straightforward. • If a program receives a serialized file from another company: • What does the program need to know to rebuild an identical object in memory? • Text or binary format • If binary, need to know everything • If text, what byte encoding? • If valid XML, we can at least read in the data • But whether we know what to do with it is uncertain

  5. some serialization formats • Binary • .csv • XML • SOAP • JSON • Protocol Buffers

  6. uses of XML serialization format • saving program state (“settings”) between executions • sharing data between companies • Purchase orders, course enrollments, catalogs, news feeds, etc. • platform-independent Remote Procedure Calls (RPC’s) • plain text passes through firewalls if attached to email • or sent as the payload of an HTTP request • human-readable and machine readable • both data and metadata (data about data), and thus self-describing • unrecognized elements can be ignored during deserialization

  7. XML serialization: the bad • some folks object to using XML as the RPC message format • efficiency concerns • XML typically creates larger files than a binary, proprietary format does • The larger the document, the longer it takes to transmit over a network • privacy and security • inherently insecure because human readable • goes through firewalls

  8. REpresentational State Transfer (REST) • HTTP GET requests (parameters in the URL) are RESTful • E.g., Google Charts API, HTML validator links, Amazon books • the URL’s get ugly, and are limited in length by browsers • Also, a philosophy promoted in blogs with the following claims: • every object that can be retrieved over a network should have a unique URL that can be used to bookmark it • XML is too bulky for shipping over the network, if more concise “platform independent” formats are available as alternatives • REST has been promoted by employees of Sun, Apple, and IBM, while Microsoft strongly supported the XML standard and adopted RPC using SOAP (a special version of XML) • Some REST drawbacks: no authentication scheme, no transactions, no standardized error reporting mechanism, no formal contract definitions

  9. The End I think part of a best friend's job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die. -Anonymous

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