Several people have told me the past days that I'm basiclly nuts. I dunno why, but since I can't find any arguments to prove them wrong they are probablly right.
Well, I think it all comes down to my fascination of doing serialization. So, I've listed my top six libraries/frameworks/technologies (note, some of these do not do cross-platform or cross-language communication).
1: use Storable qw(freeze thaw)
What can we say? Storable is reasonably fast and creates pretty compact binaries.
2. YAML
Compact readable dumps, easy to debug, easy to handcraft.
3. NSCoding protocol in Cocoa/GNUstep
I actually like this, it gives me full control of what to serialize. And I'm a big fan of Objective-C too.
4. XML
Can be compact and nice, can be huge and ugly. It's what you make of it.
5. Roll your own binary
Not a bad alternative. Autogenerating XS code from XML is fun.
9999: JAVA built-in
java.io.ObjectOutputStream, java.io.ObjectInputStream, java.io.Serializable and java.io.Externalizable says it all. Backwards-compability is a biatch. Doing it in Perl is even more a biatch, but it can be done.
Well, that list pretty much sums it up, don't we think?
Cheers,
Claes
