Day In Review

I feel as though the design of my server is starting to pay off. After I did some very useful refactorings to my server it started to feel flexible and easily extensible. I was able to add a DB Persistor fairly easily. Implementing the DB Persistor was another story.

I first thought that I wanted to serialize my objects into strings to avoid any type problems in the database. There is an awesome library named Gson which serializes java objects into JSON. The user specifies the types expected upon deserialization and it works like a charm. There was one rough spot, however, and that is with interfaces. If you serialize an object nested with references to interfaces then deserialization becomes hell. The deserializer does not know how to recreate the concrete implementation of the interface since the deserialization type only contains nested interfaces.

In the end, I avoided that mess by making my database hold references to Object. I then type-casted when pulling references back out and it worked no problem.