Storable style de-serializing for JSON structures

[Anonymous Monk]

Hi Monks,

Wisdom I seek ..

I am receiving JSON serialized objects for some perl classes. I can easily de-serialize the JSON structure back into perl data structure - hash/array using standard JSON modules and possibly into a blessed reference.

However, when the serialized class represents objects and sub-objects, I have no way to automatically create blessed reference for sub-objects.

Storable module can easily de-serialize and create blessed references for sub-objects automatically. Is there a way to do the same for JSON?

Gracias Dece

[Corion]

As far as I understand the idea of JSON, it's supposed to be cross-language, and hence doesn't really have a concept of "classes". At least JSON does not want to serialize blessed objects by default, and I guess that there is no way to (de)serialize whole class trees. Maybe you can store the class name as a separate field for each object and upon deserialization rebless all elements?

[decebel]

Thanks for reply. I agree with your suggestion

[Joost]

JSON doesn't support anything but "dumb" data structures. No class instances or anything like that.

Storable and Data::Dumper and others just produce string data, and can serialize perl objects. If all you care about is something that's technically JSON and you only pass it to other perl code, you can put the serialized string into a JSON attribute and retrieve it on the other side.

The real question would then be: why use JSON at all?