We have written a few modules for reading/writing objects to/from
strings and files in a portable and flexible manner, but most importantly
(for us, anyway), in a manner that is compatible with Java primitives,
and in a similar style to the Java classes, allowing the design of our
Java/Perl code to remain similar.
DataEncoding
DataInputStream
DataOutputStream
Classes for reading/writing primitives in a portable fashion.
These classes implement DataInput & DataOutput interfaces.
They read and write to InputStream and OutputStream
InputStream & OutputStream are imaginary classes
The following classes derive from InputStream and OutputStream:
FileInputStream
FileOutputStream
StringInputStream
StringOutputStream
Streamable
When this class is inherited from, the derived class should
defined two methods:
readFromDataStream
writeToDataStream
Classes defining these can then save and restore themselves
from DataInput/DataOutput streams, and use other methods defined
in Streamable, such as save, restore, saveToFile, readFromFile etc.
We will be making other modules available at a later data, such as
MessageDigestOutputStream (to go with the MD5 and SHA cryptographic
hash functions), and perhaps SocketInputStream and SocketOutputStream.
The beauty of these extra "Stream" modules deriving from InputStream and
OutputStream is that all objects deriving from Streamable will automatically
be able to save/restore themselves to/from the new stream module.
