Re: Serialization

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 18:38, Guilhem Lavaux wrote:
> I am trying to import object serialization classes from Classpath to 
> kaffe.

Cool. If there is anything to make the use of these classes with Kaffe
easier, please let us know.

The ObjectIn/OutputStream implementations from GNU Classpath are not
perfect though. There are some mauve failures. But for most cases they
seem to work very well.

> For example,
> I do not understand the method 
> java.io.ObjectStreamClass.getSerialPersistentFields:
> apparently the official documentation says we must use the field 
> serialPersistentFields
> to explicitly describe the fields to be exported, however you seem to use
> "getSerialPersistentFields" instead.

That must be a type. Clearly the field name to get should be just
"serialPersistentFields". There isn't a test for this in Mauve and the
only use of serialPersustentFields in the core libraries has been
removed a long time ago. Thanks for finding this.

> Besides you suppress the check for 
> the availability
> of the field although it is quite sure it will not be there (I did not 
> find it in the all source
> code of classpath): this causes some huge NullPointerException problems.
> The only solution is to change the name "getSerialPersistentFields" into 
> "serialPersistentFields"
> but I do not see the point to complicate things... :( (if someone can 
> explain it to me)

The only user of the method is setFields() which does the check before
calling getSerialPersistentFields() (it checks by also doing a
getDeclaredField, but this time with the correct spelling).

I agree that the code is not that clean.

Cheers,

Mark