[ODE] Introduction / Suggestions etc

[Nate Waddoups]

On Fri, 18 Oct 2002, Russ Smith wrote:

> nate and others - is there any useful level of concensus on what the "one
> true file format" should be? (disclaimer: i've not looked at the juice
> file format or any others). if there is no convergence yet, i have a pile
> of my own ideas i would like to contribute here.

I went with an XML sort of format merely for the sake of experience 
with SAX and putting XML on my resume.  It was also nice to have a
pre-existing parser and a standard parser API (MSXML and SAX).  I pretty
much made it up as a went along, so I'm not terribly attached to the
format.  

Novodex uses a format that looks friendly to C/C++ people (using { and }
and familiar indenting, for example), and if I understand correctly they
would be happy to see it used as a common open standard.  It's definitely
worth a look.  Speaking of which, I'm reminded of a message from Adam @
Novodex that I didn't get around to replying to the other day... 

Anyhow, once a good file format gets agreed upon, I think a second key
ingredient to standardization would be to have some open and shared
"deserialization" code available.  The less work it takes for application
developers to import such files, quicker they (we?) will support it.

Serialization and deserialization are useful for sharing data over a
network as well as persisting stuff to disk, so I kinda like the idea of
designing the file format and accompanying code with that in mind as well.  
It could be possible to load objects (and even synchronize them) over a
network using the same format and much of the same deserialization code.

That aspect would be helped quite a bit if the application objects had a
common API to use when moving data from disk (or from the network) and
into the application.

-- 

Nate Waddoups
Redmond WA USA
http://www.natew.com