I have been in involved in the creation of a C# based P2P server architecture for a while now that operates off the concept of masking the format of the data during transport from the code tasked with sending/handling the messages. A huge part of handling XML formatting during transmission (we can do binary as well) was the .NET libraries for XML serialization, however I wrote an Actionscript library to achieve the same result for use by Flash/Flex applications. The obvious benefit of this approach is that developers never need to deal with the parsing of the data (with the exception of the initial definition of binary structures).
I’‘ve begun working with Wildfire and Xiff (which has been great despite the lack of any Xiff library documentation :/) and plan on implementing a suite of messages to be wrapped inside the existing jabber messages, however I am loathing having to parse all the XML manually again. I haven’‘t seen any code that appears to do any sort of automatic de/serialization of messages within the Wildfire source code (I don’‘t want to wrongly assume there isn’‘t since I haven’‘t looked over every class yet ), but I was curious what anyone’'s thoughts were on this topic?
I was looking at the XStream library to attempt to achieve the same results that .NET is able to provide with XML serialization, but I wasn’'t sure if this was something you guys had looked into and decided against for various reasons.
Please share your thoughts on this topic!!