Using Zeroc Slice / Ice for Data Serialization (vs. Thrift / Protocol Buffers)

Question

For now, all I am looking for is simple serialization / deserialization. I am not looking for transport layers or other network stack elements.

I have found that building a simple serialize/deserialize scenario is easy in Thrift and Protocol Buffers. I would like to try to do the same using Ice's Slice.

The main benefit I see is that Slice seems to support "classes" in addition to "structs". these classes support inheritance, which seems nice. I'd like to try serializing these in a simple fashion, while ignoring the rest of the transport layers, etc which Ice provides.

I've gotten as far as running slice2java on a .ice file containing a simple class (not even with inheritance yet), but am unsure how to proceed. The generated class doesn't seem to provide a direct way to serialize itself, and I can't find documentation on how to do it using Ice libraries.

As an example, here is the PB code to do what I want:

Person p = Person.newBuilder().
  setEmail("[email protected]").
  setId(1234).
  setName("John Doe").build();

//write the buffer to a file.
p.writeTo(new FileOutputStream("JohnDoe.pb"));

//read it back in!
Person IsItJohnDoe = Person.parseFrom(new FileInputStream("JohnDoe.pb"));
System.out.println(IsItJohnDoe);

If anyone has encountered a similar problem, thank you in advance. I unfortunately don't have the time to investigate ice / slice as comprehensively as I would like.

Slava Slava · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-21T20:02:42

According to ZeroC documentation, all Java classes, generated from Slice definitions implement java.io.Serializable interface, so you can serialize them using that interface. More details you can find in documentation: Serializable Objects in Java

Using Zeroc Slice / Ice for Data Serialization (vs. Thrift / Protocol Buffers)

1 Answers