From: synergism <synergism@...>
Date: 2009-02-19T20:25:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Marshal.dump fails on extended OpenStruct

On Feb 17, 4:32 pm, Justin Collins <justincoll...@ucla.edu> wrote:
> You could just write new marshal_dump and marshal_load methods:

Thanks.  I considered that, but the bigger issue is that this makes
using DRb in any application of non-trivial complexity quite painful,
as we now need to mess with the implementation details of every
serialized object.  I was just hoping something more transparent could
be done with ostruct to make things better.

Incidentally, I continued with the delegation model I used in my
example and found that this wasn't where the trouble ended.  I had to
also eliminate an un-dumpable proc I had used to auto-initialize a
Hash of Hashes (to make an empty hash be the default value so that []
[] references would not raise an exception on uninitialized keys) i.e.

class AutoHash < Hash
    def [] key
        _=fetch(key) rescue _=store(key,{})
        _
    end
end

class C
    def initialize
        # ...
        @attributes=AutoHash.new
    end
end

instead of:

        # ...
        @attributes=Hash.new{|hash,key| hash[key]={}}

It seems programming with DRb is fraught with difficulties like
these.  I wish we had something easier to use, as otherwise DRb is
exactly what we need for this application.

Ben