Serialization (Persistence) library draft submission

From: rameysb (ramey_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-02-26 12:34:21

Fellow programmers

I have just uploaded my proposal for a boost library to address 
saving and restoring of C++ objects.  I refer to this as 
serialization.

After much effort I managed to get this working to fullfill all the 
requirements below:

Code portability - depend only on ANSI C++ facilities. 

Code economy - exploit features of C++ such as RTTI, templates, and 
multiple inheritence, etc where appropriate to make code shorter and 
simpler to use.
 
Independent versioning for each class definition. That is, when a 
class definition changed, older files can still be imported to the 
new version of the class. 

Pointer persistence. Pointers and the objects they point to are 
restored to a state equivalent to the original state when the objects 
were stored.  This includes proper restoration of multiple pointers 
to the same object.

Persistence of STL containers 

Archive portability - should be portable from one platform to 
another. 

Orthogonal specification of file stream output to permit seamless 
filtering (e.g. encryption, compression, etc). 

Non-intrusive. permit serializaton to be applied to unaltered 
classes. That don't require that classes to be serialized be derived 
from a specific base class or implement specified member functions. 
This is necessary to easily permit serialization to be applied to 
classes from class libraries that we don't want to have to alter. 

Absolute minimal coding required to add serialization to ones program

Thanks in advance to anyone who wants to comment on this submission.

Robert Ramey