Interface to tag a class that is part of the set of serializable classes * in the Tetrad API. These classes must have all of their serialiable fields * marked with @serial tags, and they may only have serializable fields that are * primitive, TetradSerializable, arrays of some TetradSerializable type, * Collection or Map classes, or String or Class fields. They must also have a * static final long field called 'serialVerUID' set to 23L. Classes in this set * may never change their class name or package path once published, and the * type of any serializable member field may never be changed to an incompatible * type. (For primitives, change the type at all constitutes an incompatible * change.) If these conditions are all met, then Tetrad sessions saved out in * one version will load in later versions of Tetrad. They may load with * incorrect information if, for instance, the name of a field is changed or the * interpretation of that field changes. So in general, when making a class * TetradSerializable, please make sure that its member fields all have good * names (that you won't want to change later) and all have clear * interpretations (that you won't want to change later).
If that all * sounds like a pain, the payoff is that even very large Tetrad sessions will * load quickly. This isn't currently true, from what I can tell, for any XML * renderer/parser on the market. If a Tetrad session contains a dataset with 50 * and 5000 cases, for instance, binary serialization will load it in well under * a second, whereas XML parsers that I've checked don't come back in under 5 * minutes.
The test class that checks the above conditions are * TestSerialization, which in turn uses methods in TetradSerializableUtils. * More details can be find there.
**
See TestSerialization and TestSerializiableUtils.
* * @author Joseph Ramsey */ public interface TetradSerializable extends Serializable { }