Question

I’m looking for the alternatives to serialize objects in my Android project. I found Wobly which seem to be fast and small. I understand how to create Wobly wrappers using WoblyImpl but I’m totally confused with how to write/read these objects from the file system? When to run WoblyGenerator and can it be done within my code? Can someone post a code example?

Answer 1

Wobly doesn’t support unknown Object fields. So fields like:

Object a;
List<Object> b;
Map<Integer, Object> c;

cannot be serialized with Wobly.
It supports all primitive classes (and their boxed counterparts), all Wobly classes, any Array/List/Map combination of the above.

So in your case, problem is that JSONArray implements List<Object>. If you know what kind of object JSONArray holds, for example List<Map<Integer, String>>, you can write:

class Example extends WoblyImpl {
  @WoblyField(id = 0)
  List<Map<Integer, String>> array;

  public void setArray(JSONArray json) {
    array = (List)json;
  }
}

Though after deserialization you will get ArrayList<HashMap<Integer,String>> and not JSONArray back.

If you don’t know what object JSONArray is holding, it would be painful to make it work with Wobly, if at all possible. You can check out comprehensive comparison of serialization libraries here:
https://github.com/eishay/jvm-serializers/wiki