Expression and serialization

[john.hui]

Dear Spring Team,

First of all, I would like to wish all of you a fruitful year ahead. I do hope that you will keep up the good work you are doing with Spring. I have found a lot of useful stuff since I started using it.

One of these powerful stuff is Expressions. The drawback is that it may take some time to Parse it (I am using Expression not ExpressionEvaluator). I tried to serialize the Expression object but it says that BaseNode is not marked as Serializable.

I think it would make Expressions more powerful if it can be serializable. Are there any plans in the near future (final release 1.1?) to do this?

Thanks a lot.

John Hui

[Erich Eichinger]

Hi,

Thank you for the flowers ;-).

I've created a Jira Entry 437 on this. I'd like to see Expressions serializable myself - but atm I see more important issues like proper documentation that needs to be done, so I'm not sure if time will allow this to make it into 1.1.

- Erich

[Aleks Seovic]

Hi John,

Thanks for the wishes, I hope we can get a solid and a well rounded release out this year and help our users solve many of the problems you face every day.

As Erich mentioned, we would also like to make expressions serializable, but unfortunately we depend to a certain extend on the base ANTLR classese we are using. Erich did some research and discovered that ANTLR's CommonAST class, which is the root class for all of our expression nodes, is not serializable, so we will have to work with ANTLR team to resolve this issue. I guess we could always create a custom ANTLR build, but that's really not the way to go as we would be stuck maintaining that in the long run instead of focusing on mor important Spring.NET features.

Hopefully we'll be able to solve this problem, but neither of us can make any promises regarding the timeline.

Regards,

Aleks

[john.hui]

Hi Aleks, Erich,

Thanks for your frankness.

I am starting be a staunch Spring believer and have talked several of my colleagues into looking at it.

One of the questions I get asked is what is the roadmap for Spring.Net? When is RC1 planned and final release planned? Or have I missed a page on the website somewhere?

Regards,

John

[Aleks Seovic]

Hi John,

First of all, we have some good news -- I believe Erich has found the way to make expressions serializable using ISerializable interface. It is a bit more work, but it is well worth it.

As for the roadmap, it's hard to tell when the final 1.1 release will be, even though we are all hoping that it can be soon. There is still a fair amount of work that needs to go into web framework and data access library, and the biggest problem is that none of us can devote 100% of our time to Spring.NET, as we all have other responsibilities within our companies.

As of late January I should have some extra time, and I'm also planning to pull in some of my developers to help out on Spring.NET, so my hope is that we can get RC1 out by the end of February and 1.1 final by the end of March. That said, I'm not making any hard promises, as the priorities could change depending on the clients' requests that could come in between now and the end of March... I'm also assuming that the rest of the crew (Mark, Erich and Bruno) will have some time to spare during this period, as it truly requires a huge amount of everyone's effort to get the release out.

Regards,

Aleks

[Erich Eichinger]

Hi,

Unfortunately I ran into a problem with the serialization solution. In most cases serialization already works on my devbox, but sometimes it still fails telling me that "CommonAST is not marked as [Serializable]". I couldn't figure out the differences yet, so please be patient.

-Erich

[Erich Eichinger]

Hi,

gotcha. I proudly present a fully serializable Spring.Expressions library.

enjoy!

-Erich

[john.hui]

Hi Erich,

That is wonderful news! Where can I get your latest achievement?

John

[Erich Eichinger]

Hi,

you can always get it from cvs. Remember that there is some delay for public cvs.

Hopefully I could fix the nightly build failures now. Then you can get it from the nightly builds page.

cheers,
Erich