Chapter 4 Data serialisation

Communication between a client and a service requires the exchange of data. This data may be highly structured, but has to be serialised for transport. This chapter looks at the basics of serialisation and then considers several techniques supported by Go APIs.

Introduction

A client and server need to exchange information via messages. TCP and UDP provide the transport mechanisms to do this. The two processes also have to have a protocol in place so that message exchange can take place meaningfully.

Messages are sent across the network as a sequence of bytes, which has no structure except for a linear stream of bytes. We shall address the various possibilities for messages and the protocols that define them in the next chapter. In this chapter we concentrate on a component of messages - the data that is transferred.

A program will typically build complex data structures to hold the current program state. In conversing with a remote client or service, the program will be attempting to transfer such data structures across the network - that is, outside of the application’s own address space.

Programming languages use structured data such as

• records/structures
• variant records
• array - fixed size or varying
• string - fixed size or varying
• tables - e.g. arrays of records
• non-linear structures such as
  • circular linked list
  • binary tree
  • objects with references to other objects

None of IP, TCP or UDP packets know the meaning of any of these data types. All that they can contain is a sequence of bytes.
Thus an application has to serialise any data into a stream of bytes in order to write it, and deserialise the stream of bytes back into suitable data structures on reading it. These two operations are known as marshalling and unmarshalling respectively.

For example, consider sending the following variable length table of two columns of variable length strings:

This could be done by in various ways. For example, suppose that it is known that the data will be an unknown number of rows in a two-column table. Then a marshalled form could be

3                // 3 rows, 2 columns assumed
4 fred           // 4 char string,col 1
10 programmer    // 10 char string,col 2
6 liping         // 6 char string, col 1
7 analyst        // 7 char string, col 2
8 sureerat       // 8 char string, col 1
7 manager        // 7 char string, col 2

Variable length things can alternatively have their length indicated by terminating them with an “illegal” value, such as '\0' for strings:

3
fred\0        
programmer\0
liping\0
analyst\0
sureerat\0
manager\0

Alternatively, it may be known that the data is a 3-row fixed table of two columns of strings of length 8 and 10 respectively. Then a serialisation could be

fred\0\0\0\0
programmer
liping\0\0
analyst\0\0\0
sureerat
manager\0\0\0

Any of these formats is okay - but the message exchange protocol must specify which one is used, or allow it to be determined at runtime.