Patrick Tullmann wrote: > > I wouldn't be surprised, though, if the approach of using an inner > class called DefaultSerialization has gone stale, and there are now > better ways of making Kaffe's Hashtable compatible with Suns. > > Does anyone remember if Sun's VM ever at any point included a > "DefaultSerialization" inner class which was magical? (I checked > JDK1.4 and JDK1.3 --- just by using reflection, mind you. :) > > I guess I'll try "fixing" Hashtable to not use this magic inner class > (and still be compatible with Sun's serialized classes). This > exercise will probably make the motivation for DefaultSerialization > obvious...
My guess is that these classes date back to when JDK1.1 was common. IIRC, at that point the only available serialization technique was to implement Serializable (and have your private instance variables directly yanked out from under you and dumped to disk) or to implement Externalizable (in which case you were responsible for absolutely everything you wanted to read and write for serialization). In that kind of a world, you really do need some magic if you want to be compatible with Sun without having to have the exact same private variables used in the exact same way. I don't believe that "DefaultSerialization" was ever magic for Sun, but I do believe that Sun only started offering anything magical with JDK1.2's release. In the (fairly long) interim between serialization's introduction with 1.1 and the release of 1.2, Kaffe would have naturally needed some magic of its own. Anyone feel like doing some CVS archeology and finding out when DefaultSerialization was introduced in Kaffe, and trying to determine which JDK release was current at the time? Stuart. -- Stuart Ballard, Programmer NetReach - Internet Solutions (215) 283-2300, ext. 126 http://www.netreach.com/ _______________________________________________ kaffe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kaffe.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kaffe