[Haskell-beginners] Haskell Serialization

[Stephen Blackheath [to Haskell-Beginners]]

Ashish,

I've been using XML picklers for serialization, which you might want to
consider if you can handle a little extra CPU/data cost.  I'm the author
of hexpat-pickle, so this is a plug for my package.  I lifted the idea
wholesale from the HXT package.

Handling changes in protocol version is really easy.  I've been doing a
lot of

xpSomething = new `xpTryCatch` old
  where
     new = ...
     old = ...

If the new encoding fails to parse, it tries the old one, and on
transmission it uses the new one.  I find it very quick and convenient
to bang out a new pickler now that I'm familiar with it.  You write your
pickler and your unpickler with the same code - it works well.

I am also working on hexpat-iteratee which is a lot more socket friendly
since it doesn't use Haskell's lazy I/O.  The learning curve increases a
little bit with doing it that way, though.


Steve

On 13/05/10 05:15, Ashish Agarwal wrote:
> Thanks for all the advice. It seems I should avoid making my types
> instances of Binary. In fact, this relates to another design issue I've
> been grappling with, supporting multiple versions of the protocol.
> Probably I'll need something like, putProtVersion1, putProtVersion2,
> etc. Or something along this line.