In favor or not, Serializable shouldn't in in widely used interfaces. As an example, a Lucene index is a reasonable implementation of a sparse matrix.
Would you require that I have to figure out how to make it serializable just because I declare it as a Matrix? Do you imagine that most developers will do more than just punt in such a situation if the interface absolutely requires that the object be serializable? Leave it to particular implementations to be serializable or not. Please, please, please don't force it into the contract for all implementations. On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 8:20 PM, Bill Barker <billwbar...@verizon.net>wrote: > - I *strongly* urge you to remove Serializable from everything! Please, we >> did this in MTJ and it turned out to be a major pain. A more appropriate >> approach is to define a class for reading/writing Matrix Market files. >> This >> can be a new feature in 2.1. If you're going to leave it, at least >> document >> that the Serializable form is not guaranteed to remain compatible across >> versions. >> >> > Like Luc, I'm generallly in favor of Serializable. Since some of the posts > on this thread have suggested problems with the current implementation, I'll > try and run some tests over the (what is here, long) weekend. Again, no > consensus so not doing anything immediately. -- Ted Dunning, CTO DeepDyve