On new features in upcoming ICE 1.6

[shantanu_k06]

Hi ZeroC folks,

I am delighted to see the list of features to be added in the upcoming version of ICE. I was away on vacation so this post of kinda late, but thanks for the pleasant surprise.

I am working on an academic project that needs object-serialisation. I have been working on an XML-based serialisation library for ICE though knowing that it was effectively going to counter ICE's strength - now I can safely wait till ICE 1.6 is available. Will you kindly consider releasing betas or CVS snapshots? And could you please let me know if the serialisation API will have deferred serialised-object RTTI ? E.g. :

// assume here : ob = serialised object
t = typeof (ob)
if t == SomeModule.SomeClass
dig 'ob'
else
none of my business, go write it into database for now
endif

Thanks again.

Regards,
Shantanu

[mes]

Hi,

I'm afraid I don't understand what you're trying to accomplish in your example.

The serialization API we are introducing will have InputStream and OutputStream interfaces. You use an output stream to create a sequence of bytes, and you can create an input stream from a sequence of bytes. We provide implementations of these interfaces that use the Ice encoding, but you could implement your own that use a different encoding.

Of course, an implementation that uses XML will have some limitations. For example, the stream is not provided with the names of data members. Furthermore, the implementation must ensure that data is read in the order it was written.

Take care,
- Mark

[shantanu_k06]

Hello Mark,

I think I now understand how the serialization API will work in ICE. By the way, I went way ahead expecting even RTTI over the wire for objects being serialised. RTTI can be emulated using workarounds that put data members to work as metadata - so that's not a big problem. Thanks for explaining.

Regards,
Shantanu

[Mako]

I too have a need to serialize an Ice Object to XML and was wondering if this was available?

In the past I have just used the generated C# classes and serialized them to SOAP but in my current project I am using Ice with C++ and have a need to output some messages in XML to be consumed by customers who are not too keen on re-building their interfaces to accept Ice objects.

Any suggestions?

[matthew]

You can look at the streaming interfaces that we added to Ice. Mark wrote an article on this in issue 12 of our newsletter. If this is not suitable, then you might want to consider writing a slice translator to automatically produce classes to do the serialization.