Re: Getting raw data of an object in memory
On 06/23/2010 10:20 PM, Boris Punk wrote:
Is there anyway to do this? Serialization looks cumbersome and I want to
dump the data of an object onto disk.
Use serialization. If you are using mostly POD-ish classes (to steal a
C++ term) and avoid native data, the defaults for serialization should
work pretty well.
eg.
class AClass{
AClass(){
}
}
how do you get a representation of this in byte form? It can't be that
difficult to grab from memory, dump to disk, then retrieve back into memory
again?
If you want to pull it back into memory without using serialization, you
would have to create your own serialization-esque approach if you wanted
it to persist across sessions, and probably would need to even if it is
in the same JVM instance. Once you get to the actual memory of the
object (which is not trivial, and would involve at best fragile pointer
magic in native code and at worst would be an ugly kludge which never
works reliably for anything beyond the most trivial setups), you would
have to figure out what all the objects were referring to and find some
way to serialize that, or find out how to patch that data in when
pulling back into memory.
Or, you could take the easy route and use a framework which does all of
that for you written by people who have a much better idea of what needs
to be done. It's called "serialization."
--
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not
tried it. -- Donald E. Knuth