RE: Bugs in Soap 2.2 BeanSerializer?

[Soumen Sarkar]

Hello there,

The point I am trying to make is there is nothing wrong with the design of
Employee class. Please read on...

The problem is with the BeanSerializer class -- which is supposed to keep
track
of what object has been traversed in course of XML
marshalling/unmarshalling.

I will pose a simple question here : Why this Java class instance can
successfully be
exchanged over the wire using Java RMI protocol? Why there is no stack
overflow?

In my opinion the answer is Java RMI can successfully serialize/deserialize
a Java
Object graph (containing cycles) which is not the case with BeanSerializer.
My original
post was to verify just this fact.

Now coming to your example, toString() is bound to cause stack overflow
because you are
not checking for cycles in your toString() implementation. I say this to
drive home the point
that there is nothing wrong with Employee class containing a field named
'subordinates'
which is of type Employee[] (or Vector of Employee). I know that this kind
of data strcture
may lead to cyclic graph (and thus endless loop in naive implementation of
toString()). But
my whole point is a serialization algorithm (toString() is a serialization
procedure) is
supposed to flatten a cyclic graph to acyclic one while retaining graph
semantics intact!

Thanks for discussing this issue.

Reagrds,
Soumen.

-----Original Message-----
From: Aleksander Slominski [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, July 13, 2001 3:17 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Bugs in Soap 2.2 BeanSerializer?


hi,

java does not have containment (or by value) storage - all is by reference
so if your references are cyclic BeanSerializer will fail...

i have checked your code and it seems as if you never used it to print
values you are sending or you would easily see that to reproduce it is
enough just to call your toString(), for example:

          Employee A = new Employee();
          Employee M = new Employee();
          A.setManager(M);
          Vector subordinates = new Vector();
          subordinates.addElement(A);
          M.setSubordinates(subordinates);
          System.out.println("manger M="+M);

when i run it i get this:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StackOverflowError
        at java.lang.FloatingDecimal.<init>(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.Double.toString(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.String.valueOf(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.StringBuffer.append(Unknown Source)
        at Employee.toString(Employee.java:90)
        at java.lang.String.valueOf(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.StringBuffer.append(Unknown Source)
        at Employee.toString(Employee.java:91)
        at java.lang.String.valueOf(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.StringBuffer.append(Unknown Source)
        at Employee.toString(Employee.java:97)
        at java.lang.String.valueOf(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.StringBuffer.append(Unknown Source)
        at Employee.toString(Employee.java:91)
        at java.lang.String.valueOf(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.StringBuffer.append(Unknown Source)

and so on for hundreds of lines...

thanks,

alek