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Made at ApacheCon EU 2009, Robert, Martijn, Felix and Marcel produced the following design on the flipover:

Service design

Basically, we need two services:

1. The serialization service, that can serialize and deserialize an object graph to an output or input stream.
2. Helpers that are used to (de)serialize specific objects.

interface SerializationService {
    void serialize(Object o, OutputStream s) throws IOException, UnknownObjectException;
    Object deserialize(InputStream s) throws IOException, UnknownObjectException;
}

interface SerializationHelper {
    // TODO
}

We also discussed adding a special manifest header to a bundle to create a sort of declarative serialization helper. That way the bundle does not need to implement and register the service (if all of them use the same helper anyway).