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Welcome to s11n.net!
s11n (an abbreviation for serialization) is an Open Source project focused on the generic serialization of objects (i.e., object persistence) in the C++ programming language (and now C, too!). If you're not a C++ programmer then this site will have nothing terribly interesting for you. If you are, however, then come in and find out how to save your data...The project's flagship library, appropriately named libs11n, can easily serialize all manner of PODs (Plain Old Data types), most STL containers, and user-defined Serializable types. By taking advantage of relatively new, advanced C++ techniques s11n turns this formerly-difficult task into child's play. It supports literally hundreds of millions of combinations of standard containers out of the box. libs11n is 100% data-format agnostic, and currently includes support for many formats, including 3 XML flavours. (As far as i am aware, this exceeds support provided by any other serialization framework, regardless of the implementation language!)
A short history of this project, and an overview of its goals, can be found here. A more "dramatic" description can be found on the s11n's Dream page.
We will now refer the reader to the abundant documentation available via these pages:
- s11n 1.2.x: the core serialization library.
- s11n 1.0.x: older version.
Development status
libs11n is a mature product, ready for production use. It has been in development since 2003 and has been very stable since 2004.My many, many thanks to those of you who have continued to feed back on these libraries! Your feedback has led to massive improvements in usability and functionality.
----- stephan beal
Recent News:
(subscribe to the news via RSS 2.0: here)(More news and information about ongoing development can be found on blog.s11n.net.)
Sun Nov 16 12:30:00 CEST 2008
c11n is beta
c11n (basically "s11n for C") is now at a point where it's usable. i've moved it over to a new build environment, stuffed it in the s11n SVN tree, and will post a downloadable tarball for it in the next few days. If there are any C coders still out there, i would love to get any feedback on the API. The API looks/works more or less how i want it to look/work, but there is some work to be done on simplifying the creation of new marshallers - that currently requires quite a bit of code (80% of it can be generated by a shell script, however).
It might be interesting to know: regardless of whether or not c11n ever becomes as useful as s11n, the work on c11n has revealed several places for improvements in future s11n work. For example, the stream model may be ported over to s11n 1.4 or 2.x, and the i/o handlers will almost certainly be ported over as well because the c11n implementations don't require an ancient version of flex (most of the s11n implementations do). There's also some work to be done on making a new s11n_node type which is (almost) as lightweight as its C counterpart.
c11n is beta
c11n (basically "s11n for C") is now at a point where it's usable. i've moved it over to a new build environment, stuffed it in the s11n SVN tree, and will post a downloadable tarball for it in the next few days. If there are any C coders still out there, i would love to get any feedback on the API. The API looks/works more or less how i want it to look/work, but there is some work to be done on simplifying the creation of new marshallers - that currently requires quite a bit of code (80% of it can be generated by a shell script, however).
It might be interesting to know: regardless of whether or not c11n ever becomes as useful as s11n, the work on c11n has revealed several places for improvements in future s11n work. For example, the stream model may be ported over to s11n 1.4 or 2.x, and the i/o handlers will almost certainly be ported over as well because the c11n implementations don't require an ancient version of flex (most of the s11n implementations do). There's also some work to be done on making a new s11n_node type which is (almost) as lightweight as its C counterpart.
Tue Nov 4 18:30:00 CEST 2008
c11n: serialization framework for C
s11n now has a little brother: c11n, the serialization library for C! c11n is very new (6 days old!) but already has all the basic features and is showing real promise.
c11n: serialization framework for C
s11n now has a little brother: c11n, the serialization library for C! c11n is very new (6 days old!) but already has all the basic features and is showing real promise.
Mon 08 Sep 2008 11:30:00 CEST
s11n 1.2.8 release
i'm home sick today and thought i'd upload a couple fixes which have been sitting on my drive for a couple of months. It mainly consists of fixes for compile warnings on certain compilers and a new pair of s11nlite::load_node() overloads. All of this came about via the work on S11nQt.
s11n 1.2.8 release
i'm home sick today and thought i'd upload a couple fixes which have been sitting on my drive for a couple of months. It mainly consists of fixes for compile warnings on certain compilers and a new pair of s11nlite::load_node() overloads. All of this came about via the work on S11nQt.
Fri Jun 6 00:42:06 CEST 2008
1.2.7 and 1.3.1 released
As always: http://s11n.net/download/
1.2.7: (stable branch)
- added de/serialize_versioned(), for simple version checking support.
- Added a fix which allows a Serializable to register with multiple Serializable base types. i didn't realise that wasn't working until a couple days ago. This change *may* affect some users who implement their own s11n_traits specializations.
1.3.1: (unstable/development branch)
- s11nlite: s/nullary_string/string_nullary/g for consistency with the related code.
- removed the new mutex and rcptr classes for now... there's simply not much use for them in the library.
- removed the uu:// URL handler. i mean, who's actually gonna use it?
- Renamed [de]serialize_f to [de]serialize_binary_f, for consistency.
- Added vappendf() family of functions, which are similar to printf() and format_string() but are more flexible. format_string() is now re-implemented on top of these functions.
- Added format_string() overloads which use a dynamically-growing buffer, to get rid of the format string length limit.
- Added optional support based on C++0x features. See
for details. Requires gcc 4.3 or some other compiler with C++0x variadic
templates support.
- The new de/serialize_versioned() funcs support simple version checking for specific objects or trees.
- Added base64 encode/decode routines, plus bindata_ser and bindata_deser helpers for de/serializing base64-encoded data. See.
1.2.7 and 1.3.1 released
As always: http://s11n.net/download/
1.2.7: (stable branch)
- added de/serialize_versioned(), for simple version checking support.
- Added a fix which allows a Serializable to register with multiple Serializable base types. i didn't realise that wasn't working until a couple days ago. This change *may* affect some users who implement their own s11n_traits specializations.
1.3.1: (unstable/development branch)
- s11nlite: s/nullary_string/string_nullary/g for consistency with the related code.
- removed the new mutex and rcptr classes for now... there's simply not much use for them in the library.
- removed the uu:// URL handler. i mean, who's actually gonna use it?
- Renamed [de]serialize_f to [de]serialize_binary_f, for consistency.
- Added vappendf() family of functions, which are similar to printf() and format_string() but are more flexible. format_string() is now re-implemented on top of these functions.
- Added format_string() overloads which use a dynamically-growing buffer, to get rid of the format string length limit.
- Added optional support based on C++0x features. See
- The new de/serialize_versioned() funcs support simple version checking for specific objects or trees.
- Added base64 encode/decode routines, plus bindata_ser and bindata_deser helpers for de/serializing base64-encoded data. See
Fri, 9 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT
Variadic templates and s11n
The s11n 1.3 branch now has some experimental new features based on new C++0x features supported by gcc 4.3. See this blog entry for details and examples:
http://blog.s11n.net/?p=53
Variadic templates and s11n
The s11n 1.3 branch now has some experimental new features based on new C++0x features supported by gcc 4.3. See this blog entry for details and examples:
http://blog.s11n.net/?p=53
This project developed in conjunction with:
- toc, the other ./configure
- Simone Müller - my girlfriend.
- Platinum: Platinum is a portable C++ application framework.
- CounterMoves, an online group of boardgaming/wargaming enthusiast
- Timberstead (my mom ;)
- WanderingHorse.net acts as a development sandbox for much code related to this project.
These web pages are lovingly hand-crafted using XEmacs and PHP, and are hosted by 1und1.de.