RE: [boost] Re: Object serialization

From: Asger Alstrup Nielsen (alstrup_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-12-07 05:15:11

In addition to persistence2 by Jens Mauer, you should take a look at XTL
by José Orlando Pereira:

http://xtl.sourceforge.net/

In addition to the version on the homepage, José has developed a beta of
a new generation of XTL which is very promising. Unfortunately, he did
not put that on the home-page, so I suppose you have to ask for it.
Maybe José will put it on the home page one day.

> I take the relative silence to mean that either no one has an interest
> or everyone's needs are more or less met by the reader/writer
> templates (and general programming pattern) in Ped.  I'm banking on
> the former.

This topic has been discussed a number of times on this list. As a
result of these discussions, both persistence and XTL have been
improved. At first persistence1 did not have a unified approach to the
reader and writer code, but this was changed after inspiration from XTL.
Also, it was discussed that persistence should separate the concepts of
format and medium, just like XTL does. I'm not sure if persistence2 does
this at the current point.
Similarly, the beta version of XTL 2 has a direct result of some of the
discussion on the boost list. It was developed to use a more powerful
and extendible system that also holds the promise to also support tagged
formats, such as XML. Personally, I think it has developed to be become
even better than early. Unforunately, nobody gave José the feedback to
bring things forward, and things kind of stopped there.

If I should compare persistence2 and XTL2, the difference comes from a
different agenda: It seems persistence2 is meant as a relatively simple
and easy-to-use system which can cover the most basic needs for
serialization, and only that. It is intentionally not intended to be a
system that can be used to solve all serialization needs. I suppose this
comes from a wish to make it easy to use and understand for the user.
On the other hand, XTL is as easy-to-use, but it is intended to be as
complete a system as possible. Therefore, the implementation may be more
difficult to understand, although I think it's not much more so. The
design is open-ended in most aspects, and the framework can solve most
serialization needs.

Personally, I'd prefer XTL2 to be developed further, since it holds the
most promise to me.

Greets,

Asger Alstrup Nielsen