[Pipet Devel] PAOS and the Work Flow System

[Carlos Maltzahn]

Once we decided that a Python interpreter is always going to be available
in the Loci framework and that the format of Python pickle is not going to
change, it seems feasible to define Python-pickled stuff as a new XML data
type. I wouldn't call this an ad-hoc protocol because we are using two
fairly established ways to describe things.

But I might miss the point here because I have not followed the recent
discussions very well...

Carlos

On Wed, 14 Apr 1999, Konrad Hinsen wrote:

    > > module plus some optimizations. The pickle module lets you serialize
    > > Python objects into strings so you can send them over the net. There is no
    > > specified standard for the pickle protocol.
    > 
    > I think we need to be careful, we should write our own pickling
    > routines that serialize data as XML. From what I understand of
    > pickling, this shouldn't be a problem, but I want to make clear that
    > ad-hoc protocols are not going to be fun.
    
    It's not as bad as it seems. The pickle protocol is in a sense documented
    by Python's pickle module (which is very readable), and it is not going
    to change (pickle files are used for archiving data in many applications).
    
    Pickle data has the advantage of being compact and efficient, but also
    the disadvantages of being neither "human reader friendly" nor easy to
    process in other languages (because it is basically a text
    representation of Python's internal data structures).
    
    Which raises a problem: writing a pickler using another format is not
    difficult, as long as the simple relation between the data layout
    and Python's internal data structure remains. This however may not
    be desirable, and then writing a general pickler (which can deal with
    any kind of object) is probably not so easy.
    
    Konrad.
    -- 
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen at cnrs-orleans.fr
    Centre de Biophysique Moleculaire (CNRS) | Tel.: +33-2.38.25.55.69
    Rue Charles Sadron                       | Fax:  +33-2.38.63.15.17
    45071 Orleans Cedex 2                    | Deutsch/Esperanto/English/
    France                                   | Nederlands/Francais
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------