Remove serialization.

[gbrail]

Get rid of every class that implements "Serializable" and associated
machinery for readObject/writeObject and the like. Get rid of tests
that assume it's there (not very many of those actually).

Remove the "serialize" and "deserialize" commands from the shell.

Remove SerializableInputStream and SerializableOutputStream.

Closes #704

[gbrail]

@rbri and others who are regularly running the latest Rhino -- any chance you can try this and see if it causes big problems? It removes some classes and support that were previously supported although I think that they were generally not used.

[rbri]

@gbrail did a first quick test with you PR applied to the HtmlUnit branch. Looks correct so far - no regressions. I only had failing tests because HtmlUnit supports serialization of dom objects (Scriptables). This was expected and is something i have to solve inside HtmlUnit.
For me it is fine to go ahead with this.

[rbri]

As this is a major change, maybe we can announce the plan and doing the next release without this. Then we will merge this directly after the release to have this for some time in the snapshots.

[gbrail]

Yes, I was thinking that it would be something for 1.8.0. And if it's really useful, we can work on a better way to do it -- but, for instance, I noticed that when you serialize an object it just keeps going and going until you are doing things like serializing the internal state of the interpreter, and I'm not sure that doing that really makes a lot of sense. Perhaps we can come up with a better way to serialize objects that supports your use case but doesn't serialize a bunch of stuff that I imagine you can't use.

…

On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 12:06 PM RBRi ***@***.***> wrote: As this is a major change, maybe we can announce the plan and doing the next release without this. Then we will merge this directly after the release to have this for some time in the snapshots. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#727 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAD7I25ACBITZ3FVSJBXSXTRZDQ2PANCNFSM4OHPHF2A> .

[tonygermano]

See #704 (comment) from linked issue. It mentions that serialization is currently being used with continuations.

[EduFrazao]

Hi Folks. What is the goal/benefit of remove serialization support?
My application makes heavy use of server-side scripting, and they are hold into the application-server sessions.
We are evaluating support the distrubuition of http-sessions, wich will rely on serialize everything. This change will cause impact those scenario rigth?

[p-bakker]

Converted to draft, as has conflicts and open discussions