Re: [Boost-users] Re: Is there a binary serialization class ?

From: Volker Boerchers (vboerchers_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-09-03 09:11:32

On Wed, 1 Sep 2004, Georgios Diamantopoulos wrote:

> Hi Mike,
>
> I think we could all use that class, especially if it comes with boost.
>
> Let us know what happens and thanks :)
>
> George
>
>
> > Hmm, since this subject is coming up here and has also just popped up
> > on comp.lang.c++.moderated, I'll venture an offering.
> > 
> > A little over a year ago, I wrote a general-purpose binary
> > packing/unpacking class (inspired by Perl and Python's pack() and
> > unpack()) that has held up pretty well in production for over a year
> > now.  I've always wanted to ask my company for permission to release
> > it into the public domain (maybe even into Boost?!?), but haven't
> > pushed it as I'd not heard anyone looking for anything quite like
> > it--until now.
> > 
> > If anyone's interested, I'll pursue getting permission from my company
> > to open it up ASAP.
> > 
> > To solve the endianness, size, and padding problems, the approach I'd
> > take with my class would be to make sure the protocol expected a
> > single character indicating the byte order of the data stream first;
> > then you'd grab the appropriate unpacker from the factory and start
> > unpacking away.  It's up to the protocol writer to know how to unpack
> > the bytes in the proper order into the proper structures from there.
> > 
> > Of course, packing/unpacking isn't quite the same as serialization,
> > I'm sure, but maybe serialization isn't exactly the term that applies
> > here?

CORBA (omg.org) uses CDR (Common Data Representation) in its transport
protocol.  In the (free) ACE framework
(http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html) it is generally used for
sending binary data over the wire.

Since CDR is a standard and there are many implementations of it it might
be an alternative.

Volker
-- 
Volker Börchers
TECON Systems AG, http://www.tecon.de