Non-Recursive serialization

[almondtools]

Currently the object tree is traversed in a recursive way for serialization. This could lead to stack overflow exceptions if the tree is too deep.

It would be more robust to traverse the object tree in a non recursive breadth first strategy.

[almondtools]

Approach

We can implement this by giving each Serializer an additional method dependentObjects() which return all non-trivial objects the object to be serialized depends on.

The algorithm

• collect a transitive closure of all dependencies
• assign each collected object a serialized value prototype object (generated by the already existing generate(Type, SerializerSession) method)
• traverse the closure in post order (objects without dependencies first) all call populate(SerializedValue, Object, SerializerSession) on each pair (SerializedValue,Object)

Changes

• each serializer must not call SerializerFacade.serialize
• probably we can eliminate the dependencies to SerializerFacade completely.

This algorithm will not suffer from the problems with forward