2011/5/24 Martin Dias <tinchodias@gmail.com>:
Hi folks. I am really happy to announce that ESUG is sponsoring me for Fuel development through the ESUG SummerTalk. I am Martin Dias, a student at Buenos Aires, Argentina. The idea behind this SummerTalk is to implement Fuel, a binary, fast and general-purpose object graph serializer in Pharo. It is based on VisualWorks' Parcels ideas.
Please excuse me if this is the wrong forum to discuss things.
Actually, the project has already started since several months. Tristan Bourgois and I started with the project while doing an internship with RMoD, INRIA. Since a couple of months, Mariano Martinez Peck joined the team, and now he is the official mentor in the SummerTalk.
ESUG website for SummertTalk: http://www.esug.org/wiki/pier/Promotion/SummerTalk/SummerTalk2011
The website with all the necessary information is here: http://rmod.lille.inria.fr/web/pier/software/Fuel It even includes slides explaining the algorithm. In addition, a paper is in progress.
Could you make the slides available in some other format than Flash?
For the moment, Fuel already provides the following features:
- Fast pickle format. It is much faster to materialize than to serialize.
What has led to the conclusion that materialization is more important than serialization? I can image scenarios when there is a one to one relationship and scenarios where serialization is more important (e.g. session replication).
- Correctly support class reshape (when the class of serialized objects has changed).
So what do you do when an instance variable was added? Set it to nil and hope that everything will continue to work?
- Serialize ANY kind of object. For the moment there is no object to our knowledge that we cannot serialize and materialize.
Really? You serialize Socket, Process, FileStream and something meaningful happens?
- Be able to completely serialize classes and traits (not just a global name). - Support cycles and avoid duplicates in the graph. - Integration to Moose with an extension to export and import their models. - Detection of globals: for example if you serialize Transcript, it is not duplicated and instead managed as a global reference. - Solve common problems like Set rehash. - Buffered writing: we use a buffered write stream for the serialization part (thanks Sven!). - No need of special support from the VM. - Try to have a good object oriented design. - Well tested (about 120 tests, for the moment). - Large set of benchmarks (even benchmarks for Moose extension).
And of course, there are a lot features for the future. You can see some of them in the website and some in the issue tracker: http://code.google.com/p/fuel/issues/list
We really appreciate all kind of feedback and comments. If you want to try it, check in the website how to do it. It is extremely easy.
Once again, I want to thank a lot to ESUG for sponsoring the project. I plan to create a "news" section in the website with some RSS. I will keep you informed.
Cheers Philippe