serialization

#Data Serialization

Data serialization, for our purposes, simply refers to taking a block of data and transmitting it one byte at a time over some interface. This tutorial will give an example using sockets and the C programming language, but the concepts are the same for Java.

Loading a buffer and transmitting

Many types of data can be dealt with as simply a stream of bytes. In this C example, a .png image is read into a program as its individual bytes and then transmitted in order over a TCP socket.
FILE* fp = fopen("image.png","rb"); //open image.png for binary reading char buf[32768]; //allocate 32K buffer for serializing image data (watch out for RAM usage) int bytes_read = 0; while(!feof(fp)) //keep going until we reach the end of the file { bytes_read = fread(buf, 1, sizeof(buf)-1, fp); //read as many bytes as possible from the image write(socketfd, buf, bytes_read); //serially write as many bytes as we have in the buffer to the socket }

Example Code

Server

Client