Saving workspaces, scenes and objects in general

[mpizenberg]

I have search a bit about how to serialize objects in order to save them in files. It seems that there are two main options :

• using JSON format
• using object serialization with pickle

Apparently both types have advantages and inconvenients. I would like to have your opinion and/or preferences. Below I recap advantages and disadvantages of both according to me.

JSON

Advantages :

• well known and popular
• cross plateform and languages
• approximately human readable

Disavantages :

• many objects does not automatically support JSON serialization (need to rewrite it)
• heavy and non compressed generated files

  Pickle

Advantages :

• works with almost every object (but QT objects)
• easily personalize serialization of objects
• short and compact binary serialization

Disadvantages :

• binary serialization (only python and not human readable)

[fabiencastan]

I recommend json for the file format. Using pickle automatically store your objects. It's great to create disk cache for example, but not a good solution for a file format because it's difficult to deal with compatibility issues, etc. It's more interesting to find the right representation and then convert that to your objects in memory instead of trying to directly pickle your objects.