Java XML archiver

[Tom Wainwright]

A while back I asked this list if there was anyone working on an XML archiver
for Swarm similar to the lisp and hdf5 archivers.  I finally had some free time
to learn more Java than I ever wanted to know, and put something together.  It
is available at:
        http://www.nwfsc-hc.noaa.gov/~twain/swarmstuff/
(NOTE:  this is a temporary web page, subject to disappearing without notice).

This really is not a Swarm archiver, and is not modeled after the
AppArchivers--it is a general Java object archiver, which will dump/restore the
data fields from almost any Java object, but it works as a way of doing XML
configuration files for (java)Swarm.  I've included a modification of jheatbugs
("xheatbugs") that uses an XML configuration file rather than jheatbugs.scm.  It
is set up for Linux with a Makefile that will need to be customized for your
installation; should be easy to modify for other OS's.

This is just a concept test--don't expect it to work robustly.  In particular,
it will not reliably archive inner classes, it will only restore classes that
have a default constructor (i.e. one with no arguments), and I have not
implemented dump/restore of primitive arrays yet (object arrays do work).  It
also will try to violate all sorts of Java access security if you dump/restore
private fields in an object; whether this works depends on your local java
security environment.

XML is nice to read, but too verbose for dumping large data structures, so this
isn't much use as a model archiver.  

Let me know if you find this at all useful, or if you get inspired to tear it
apart and do it right.

The U.S. Government does not warrant this software to be useful for any purpose
whatsoever.

-- 
Tom Wainwright
NOAA/NMFS/NWFSC
2030 S Marine Science Dr
Newport, OR 97365 USA
address@hidden

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