I have an ESB. Any serialized message transports its own fully qualified name (that is, namespace + class name). I have a concrete type for each message that encapsulates a specific logic to be executed.
Every time I receive a message, I need to deserialize it at first, so I can perform its operations –once more, depending on its concrete type–.
I need a way to register every single class at compile time or during my application initialization.
With .net I would use reflection to scan assemblies and discover the message types during initialization, but how would you do it in C++?
C++ has no reflection capability. I suppose you could try to scan object files, etc., but there’s no reliable way to do this (AFAIK); the compiler may entirely eliminate or mangle certain things.
Essentially, for serialization, you will have to do the registration (semi-)manually. But you may be interested in a serialization library that will help out with the chores, such as Boost Serialization.