Alabama

Alabama is a serialization library for Ceylon. It uses the ceylon.language.serialization API to provide idiomatic roundtrip serialization to and from JSON.

tl;dr: example

Features

¹ Obviously features such as "identity-preserving" require we add extra information to the JSON, but we try to do this in an idiomatic way.

² "JS" meaning Ceylon running on a JS VM, but obviously it's JSON so you can have a plain JS client if you want.

³ That's what gzip is for ;-)

Non-goals

Alabama may or may not be the right choice for you, depending on what you're trying to achieve.

• You're using an existing JSON-based REST API

  • You'll probably find using ceylon.json directly better fits your needs, because Alabama is not very configurable for parsing arbitrary JSON into Ceylon objects.

• You're running on the JVM and need interop with Java code

  • Ceylon classes look like Java beans underneath, so libraries like Jackson and Gson should work OK.

  • Most Ceylon classes are Java-Serializable, so
    Java serialization if work for you, if you're not tied to JSON

• You need "long term persistence"

  • Alabama is still evolving, and does not support schema evolution, so the JSON emitted might change even if your classes do not.

• You're in an all-Ceylon world, or there are no existing consumers for your JSON and you're not super bothered about controlling every aspect of what your JSON looks like

  • Alabama is for you

• Speed is the most important thing for you.

  • Alabama prioritises preserving Ceylon semantics. If you need blazingly fast you might be prepared to compromise on that.

Example

OK, here's some Ceylon code:

serializable class Person(first, last, address) {
    shared String first;
    shared String last;
    shared Address address;
}
serializable class Address(lines, zip) {
    [String+] lines;
    String zip;
}

value p = Person {
    first = "Tom";
    last = "Bentley";
    address = Address {
        lines = ["Jackson", "Alabama"]; 
        zip="1234";
    };
};

String json = serialize(p);
Person p2 = deserialize<Person>(json);

And in case you're interested, this is what the JSON looks like:

TODO!!!