[Boost-users] serialization: efficient binary archive

From: __PPS__ (i-love-spam_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-22 00:52:37

Hello,
I want to write simple binary searialization class.
the serialized data should be as compact as possible, e.g. I don't want 
to have "serialization::archive" string etc, since most of the time I 
need really basic serialization performed into many separate archives:
something like hunrdreds of archives that contain simple int, or string. 
I also don't need any versioning. These data serializations are for a 
short period of time (automatically removed after a few minutes), to 
share data between multiple processes on the same machine.
Basicly, I need to serialize many key-value pairs, and then to be able 
to extract values by their keys. Keys are simple strings, values can be 
anything.
Since I cannot use boost::any for value part, then I decided to go a way 
around. I'll have a map that maps string keys to the serialized binary 
string of value, and then this big map is serialized. The other process 
then deserializes this map and if it accesses some value it also needs 
to deserialize the value. I really need simple searialization, something 
like
i:1234,s[5]:Hello
for int(1234) and string("Hello") with all the numbers serialized in 
binary etc, without any BE/LE code - always the same machine used.
I think it would be really enough for me to have serialization of 
numbers, strings and binary data, but I want to use boost::serialization 
to allow users to insert objects of their own classes in that key-value 
pairs.

basicly, my goal is to create such class that maps string keys to any 
data, then all this map is serialized and some other process 
deserializes this map and accesses values by keys.

Is there's something in serialization library you could suggest me to 
look at. I viewed demo_fast_archive, but I cannot find good info on 
creating my own archive classes.
It seems that my problem would be completely solved if there were some 
way to serialize boost::any, in this case I would only needed to 
serialize std::map<std::string,boost::any>

thanks