Tim,
As you point out, the problem of serialization is far reaching. Basically, we need to get every project included in Geronimo to buy into serialization stability, and to my knowledge there are no projects in Geronimo that today have committed to this. In addition, Geronimo itself is does not support serialization stability, and if we choose this path, we must clean up our own house by verifying every serializable class is set up for upward compatible serialization. This is by no means an easy task, but I think before we ask something of other project we are aware of the effort involved in what we are asking.
Alternatively, we could choose to do like Sun did with swing and give up on serialization and use an xml based storage mechanism based on Java Beans rules.
The issue is not the implementation (serialization vs. XML) but the compatibility of the information set between versions.
As David Jencks has pointed out elsewhere, we do not need every project to commit to serialization stability everywhere, just in the classes that are being used in GBean attributes. If they do great; if they don't we just don't use those classes as attribute values and handle reconstruction ourselves.
And after all, one requirement Sun place on a JavaBean is that it is Serializable.
-- Jeremy
