Serialization

Company data must be serializable so that data is preserved also during downtimes of the system:Company. Any serialization format is conceivable here. Serialized data would be typically stored in the file system between program runs.

Motivation

Programming languages differ in terms of serialization approaches in interesting ways. In addition, multiple reasonable serialization options may exist for even the same language.

Illustration

One reasonable serialization format is Language:JSON. The typical sample company is represented in Language:JSON as follows:

{ 
  "name" : "Acme Corporation",
  "departments" : [
    {
      "name" : "Research",
      "manager" : {
        "name" : "Fred",
        "salary" : 88888
      }   
    },
    {
      "name" : "Development",
      "manager" : {
        "name" : "Marie",
        "salary" : 77777
      },
      "departments" : [
        {
          "name" : "Dev1",
          "manager" : {
            "name" : "Bob",
            "salary" : 77776
          }
        },
        {
          "name" : "Dev2",
          "manager" : {
            "name" : "Alice",
            "salary" : 77775
          },
          "employees" : [
            {
              "name" : "Ralf",
              "salary" : 4711
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Various languages blend well with Language:JSON as serialization format. For instance, Language:Python provides library support to serialize Language:Python's dictionaries in Language:JSON. For instance, in the following code, the load method of a Language:JSON API is used to deserialize on-file Language:JSON content.

company = json.load(open(sys.argv[1], 'r'))

The snippet originates from Contribution:pyjson.

Relationships

See Feature:Open serialization and Feature:Closed serialization for concrete serialization features.
Feature:Persistence is concerned with persistence instead of serialization.

Guidelines

This is an abstract (an XOR) feature, which should not be chosen as such, but instead either Feature:Open serialization or Feature:Closed serialization is to be selected.
A suitable demonstration of serialization should deserialize company data so that the "resurrected" company can be processed, e.g., by totaling salaries according to Feature:Total. Also, round-tripping of serialization should be demonstrated such that serialization of given data following by de-serialization returns the same data.