Hi Tom, On Friday, 27 April 2012 at 12:44 PM, Tom Christie wrote: > Seeing another proposal for Customizable Serialization for the GSoC this year > prompted me to dust off the bits of work I've done along similar lines. > I'd really like to see this get properly addressed in core and I thought it > was about time I helped to make it happen. > > I've made a fairly comprehensive start, and pushed the results of what I have > to date as the `django-serializers` project. It's available on PyPI, and the > source is here: > http://github.com/tomchristie/django-serializers > > There are some docs up on the GitHub site, but in brief it gives you: > > * A Declarative Serializer/Field API that mirrors the Form/Field API. > * A Serializer class which can deal with arbitrary python objects. > * A ModelSerializer class which can handle model instances and query sets. > * A DumpDataSerializer class which mimics the existing dumpdata behaviour. > * Supports flat or nested ouput, and deals with recursive structures. > * Handles FK, M2M, OneToOne, and reverse relationships, model fields, and > non-database attributes/properties. > * Serialization structure decoupled from output encoding concerns. > * Currently supports JSON, YAML, and XML. > * Decent test suite of the above. > > It's not yet at the point where it could be a proposal for core - Right now > the > API isn't backwards compatible with the existing serializers, the dump > data serializer is still missing some tweaks such as dealing with natural > keys, > and there's some work to do on the XML output. It is a pretty comprehensive > start though, and I'm really happy with the shape of the API.
Thanks for letting us know about the prior art -- I know we discussed serialisation at DjangoCon last year, and I'm kicking myself that I didn't provide more feedback at the time. Hopefully having this as a GSoC project will be enough to kick me into action and bring this project to completion. > > Given that Piotr's GSoC proposal has now been accepted, I'm wondering what the > right way forward is? I'd like to continue to push forward with this, but I'm > also aware that it might be a bit of an issue if there's already an ongoing > GSoC project along the same lines? > > Having taken a good look through the GSoC proposal, it looks good, and there > seems to be a fair bit of overlap, so hopefully he'll find what I've done > useful, and I'm sure I'll have plenty of comments on his project as it > progresses. > > I'd consider suggesting a collaborative approach, but the rules of the GSoC > wouldn't allow that right? Unfortunately, the GSoC rules don't allow for collaboration - the work that is submitted needs to be that of the student alone. However, they do allow for others to contribute by providing code reviews, design feedback, and so on. Given that we're building a user-facing API, there's also plenty of room to provide assistance by testing -- i.e., hunting down obscure serialisation use cases, and making sure that the API we've got can cover them. If you've got the time and enthusiasm, I'd certainly appreciate you hanging around in a "co-mentor"-like capacity. You've clearly spent a lot of time thinking about on this problem, and I'm sure your input would be extremely valuable. You're also in a slightly more helpful timezone for Piotr, so if he needs some feedback when I'm not available, it would be nice to have someone he can call on that is familiar with the problem and his progress. Yours, Russ Magee %-) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en.
