[Biojava-l] Serialization

[Thomas Down]

Hi...

I've been starting to look at the issues of serializing
BioJava objects.  As well as the obvious benefits of
persistance, this would allow us to pass the objects
around easily in an RMI environment.

As a first step, I've just added serialization support
for the `well-known' Alphabets and Residues (e.g. DNA,
Thymine) provided by the AlphabetManager class.

[aside...
For those interested in Serialization, these are interesting
cases since it's important that they are singleton objects.
I've used to Object Replacement features of serialization to
replace the actual objects with little placeholders in the
serialized object stream.  This seems to be a good approach
to take whenever working with singletons.
]

Hopefully, we can see most of the core classes becoming
serializable in the fairly near future.

Let me know what you think of this (and if anyone wants
to volunteer to go throughi the existing code checking 
for serializability...)

Happy hacking,

Thomas
-- 
``He returned with milk, flour, sugar... and incidentally,
a new body.''   -- Octavia Butler