From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2004-01-23T00:09:09+09:00
Subject: Re: Marshal format filter? 1.6.8 to 1.8.1

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Berger, Daniel wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I'm in a situation where I may want to have a 1.8.1 client communicate
> with a 1.6.8 server, where the server is sending back marshal'd data.
> Is there a way to "filter" a 1.6.8 format into a 1.8.1 format, and
> vice-versa?
> 
> Because the Marshal format can change even between minor releases, I
> think having a filter of some sort like this would be a good thing to
> have around in general.

I'm kind of curious about that, too, as my current Iowa implementation 
relies on Marshal, which means that Iowa servlets have to be running the 
same version of Ruby as the code that is sending a request to them.

I tried using YAML to do what Marshal is doing, but the last time I tried 
it, under 1.6.8, with an older version of YAML, it was horribly, horribly 
slow, so I reluctantly went back to Marshal.

This is a tangent, but is YAML any faster than it used to be?

I have other reasons for not wanting to use Marshal (namely, makes it 
rather difficult to have a Perl CGI or a handler written in C make 
requests to Iowa servlets), so I may have to roll my own task oriented 
communications protocol here, but I don't want to do that just yet if I 
don't have to.


Thanks,

Kirk Haines