If you enjoy technical Javascript then you'll love this project. The Javascript
Serializer allows you to take any javascript object, including some really complex
ones, and serialize it out to a string.
The fun part is what types of strings you can create, you can create a Javascript
Object string. What's the use of that, you might ask? Well imagine you created a
shopping cart javascript object to store products on the client. Why you'd want to
do that is unclear, but just say you had your reasons. When people add objects
to the cart, stored as a complex javascript object, you could serialize the whole
thing and store the string a cookie. Then on every page load you could check if the
cookie was there and reserialize it as a javascript object simply by calling eval()
on it. Then when you're ready to post it back to the server you can serialize
it as an XML string and post that file. I was going to write an example of this but
you'll have to make do with the demo below.
The javascript is divided into three separate files. Serializer.js does the hard
work of converting the javascript objects into an internal format. You can then
plug in SerializerJS.js or Serializer.XML which adds in the GetJSString() and
GetXMLString() methods automatically. It's split up like this as you could add in
differnet formatters later. The obvious one to write would be GetHTMLString()
but I haven't done that.
This code is inspired by
JSON,
but it would be a mistake to think of it as the same thing. JSON makes no note
of an object's type, and the Javascript Serializer keeps the exact type of
an object, even noting if a string was created literally or using the 'String'
constructor.
There are some obvious
applications for interplay with Ajax here that hopefully someone will fully
explore, and an XML to Javascript object converter is also on the list of
things to do.
I've used the Serializer on this site in a few places. The
EasyRead login
URLs are created using it, and the
CSS Scrollbar values are stored to a cookie
using it.
If you want to play around with the files then you can
download the zip files,
and if you build a good demo then please send us a copy. The files should work on all
modern browsers.
Don't try and serialize the serializer object, it'll just make your head hurt.