From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-03-18T03:05:21+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: Madeleine 0.1

On Tue, Mar 18, 2003 at 01:18:09AM +0900, Anders Bengtsson wrote:
>  --- Brian Candler <B.Candler@pobox.com> wrote:
> 
> > I don't think your code should have anything YAML-specific, because
> > there
> > are many other marshalling modules you might want to use (SOAP being
> > another
> > example). I think it should be up to the end-user to wrap them so
> > that there
> > is a Foo::load and Foo::dump, if they don't have them already.
> 
> I'll probably ship a few out-of-the-box wrappers for different
> marshalling implementations with Madeleine and at the same time give
> the user the option to write their own. This won't really affect the
> core parts of Madeleine.

I thought that SOAP::Marshal didn't need any wrapping:

irb(main):001:0> require 'soap/marshal'
true
irb(main):002:0> a = SOAP::Marshal.dump("abc")
"<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"us-ascii\" ?>\n<env:Envelope xmlns:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\" xmlns:env=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\" xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\">\n<env:Body>\n<String xmlns:n1=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/\" xsi:type=\"xsd:string\" env:encodingStyle=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/\">abc</String>\n</env:Body>\n</env:Envelope>\n"
irb(main):003:0> b = SOAP::Marshal.load(a)
"abc"

but actually it's not compatible with Marshal, because:
- you can't pass an IO object to load, it must be a string
- you can't pass an IO object as the second parameter to dump
  (it takes a mappingRegistry instead)

I think that's a weakness of soap4r, because if you have a 100MB database,
it forces you to create (say) 400MB of XML, and then write it to a file.
Suddenly you need 5 times as much RAM as you did originally, and also
concatenation of large strings is inefficient in Ruby 1.6.

For the purposes of a database, I think it's reasonable for you to require
dump(obj,IO) and load(IO).

Regards,

Brian.