Question

I need to aggregate 2 Strings and a List into a single byte[] in order to send it through the network (using a special library that has a function send(byte[]).

Then, on the other end, I need to get the 3 different objects back.

I’ve done an ugly implementation of it, but it is very slow. Basically, what I do is

        public byte[] myserializer(String dataA, String dataB, List<byte[]> info) {

        byte[] header = (dataA +";" + dataB + ";").getBytes();

        int numOfBytes = 0;
        for (byte[] bs : info) {
            numOfBytes += bs.length;
        }

        ByteArrayOutputStream b = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        ObjectOutputStream o;
        try {
            o = new ObjectOutputStream(b);
            o.writeObject(info);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        byte[] data = b.toByteArray();

        int length = header.length + data.length;
        byte[] headerLength = (new Integer(header.length)).toString()
                .getBytes();
        byte[] pattern = ";".getBytes();
        int finalLength = headerLength.length + pattern.length + length;

        byte[] total = new byte[finalLength];enter code here
        total = // Copy headerLength, header and total into byte[] total

        return return;

In essence I’m creating kind of a frame that looks like this

      HEADER                    INFO

(———————————————–)(———————————-)
HEADER_LENGHT;DATA_A;DATA_B;SERIALIZED_LIST_OBJECT

Then, on the receiver side, I do the inverse process and that’s “all”. This works, but it is PRETTY inefficient and ugly.

Suggestions? Best practices? Ideas?

Oh…just one note more: this have to work for J2SE and Android too

Thanks so much in advanced!!

Answer 1

Here is a simplistic method of serializing an array of bytes and deserialize it on the other side. Note that the method only accept one argument of type List<byte[]> and since your argument dataA and dataB are of type String, you can simply assume that the two first byte[] elements in the list are those two argument. I believe that this is a lot faster than object serialization through an ObjectOutputStream and will be faster to deserialize on the other side as well.

public class ByteListSerializer {
static private final int INT_SIZE = Integer.SIZE / 8;

    static public void main(String...args) {
        ByteListSerializer bls = new ByteListSerializer();

        // ============== variable declaration =================
        String dataA = "hello";
        String dataB = "world";
        List<byte[]> info = new ArrayList<byte[]>();
        info.add(new byte[] {'s','o','m','e'});
        info.add(new byte[] {'d','a','t','a'});
        // ============= end variable declaration ==============

        // ======== serialization =========
        info.add(0, dataA.getBytes());
        info.add(1, dataB.getBytes());
        byte[] result = bls.dataSerializer(info);

        System.out.println(Arrays.toString(result));

        // ======== deserialization ========
        List<byte[]> back = bls.dataDeserializer(result);

        String backDataA = new String(back.get(0));
        String backDataB = new String(back.get(1));
        back.remove(0);
        back.remove(0);

        // ============ print end result ============
        System.out.println(backDataA);
        System.out.println(backDataB);
        for (byte[] b : back) {
            System.out.println(new String(b));
        }
    }

    public byte[] dataSerializer(List<byte[]> data) {
        ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        ByteBuffer lenBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocate(4);

        try {
            for (byte[] d : data) {
                lenBuffer.putInt(0, d.length);
                out.write(lenBuffer.array());
                out.write(d);
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        // wrap this
        byte[] dataBuffer = new byte[out.size() + 4];
        lenBuffer.putInt(0, out.size());
        System.arraycopy(lenBuffer.array(), 0, dataBuffer, 0, 4);
        System.arraycopy(out.toByteArray(), 0, dataBuffer, 4, out.size());

        return dataBuffer;
    }

    public List<byte[]> dataDeserializer(byte[] data) {
        if (data.length < INT_SIZE) {
            throw new IllegalArgumentException("incomplete data");
        }

        ByteBuffer dataBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(data);
        int packetSize = dataBuffer.getInt();

        if (packetSize > data.length - INT_SIZE) {
            throw new IllegalArgumentException("incomplete data");
        }

        List<byte[]> dataList = new ArrayList<byte[]>();
        int len, pos = dataBuffer.position(), nextPos;

        while (dataBuffer.hasRemaining() && (packetSize > 0)) {
            len = dataBuffer.getInt();
            pos += INT_SIZE;
            nextPos = pos + len;
            dataList.add(Arrays.copyOfRange(data, pos, nextPos));

            dataBuffer.position(pos = nextPos);
            packetSize -= len;
        }

        return dataList;
    }
}

The frame is constructed as

     - 4 bytes: the total bytes to read (frame size = [nnnn] + 4 bytes header)
    |      - 4 bytes: the first chunk size in bytes
    |     |          - x bytes: the first chunk data
    |     |         |          
    |     |         |           - 4 bytes: the n chunk size in byte
    |     |         |          |         - x bytes: the n chunk data
    |     |         |          |        |
    |     |         |          |        |
[nnnn][iiii][dddd....][...][iiii][dddd...]

The example above will output

[0, 0, 0, 34, 0, 0, 0, 5, 104, 101, 108, 108, 111, 0, 0, 0, 5, 119, 111, 114, 108, 100, 0, 0, 0, 4, 115, 111, 109, 101, 0, 0, 0, 4, 100, 97, 116, 97]
hello
world
some
data

Note that the frame format is formed of byte[] chunks so as long as you know the order of the chunks, you can use these methods with virtually any set of data.