ProtocolBuffers objects in the cache

[yahro]

Hi,

I would like to store objects generated by Google's ProtocolBuffers in the cache. Do I need to write my own Externalizer for them? I noticed that Infinispan is using @Marshallable annotation for creating own externalizers. How can I do similar thing without using annotations?

Best regards,

Jarek

[manik]

The @Marshallable stuff is internal only (for now).  We may make it public API at some point, once we have a proper scheme to ensure magic numbers don't collide.

Re: protobufs, the best way to do this is for you to handle the marshalling of values outside of the cache.  E.g., Object -> byte[], and then cache.put(key, byte[]).

HTH,

Manik

[yahro]

Thanks for info, for now I'll stick to using byte[]. In the future it would be nice to be able to use generics e.g.

ConcurrentMap<Integer, SomeProtoBufClass> myTypeSafeCache = manager.getCache("myCache");

In order to do this kind of stuff efficiently, flexible (extensible) serialization mechanism would be helpful.

The simplest solution might be adding configuration parameter to the cache (serializer="mySerializerClass"). Serializer class would implement Infinispan interface, which would declare methods to do conversion Object <-> byte[]. That way everyone could plug whatever they come up with (for instance Protocol Buffer). Just a suggestion .

Best regards,

Jarek