How do I do automatic data serialization of data objects?
haskell, ocaml, serialization
Solution
For what it's worth, I think the pre-processor solution found in OCaml (as exemplified by sexplib, binprot and json-wheel among others) is pretty great (and I think people do very similar things with Template Haskell). It's far more efficient than reflection, and can also be tuned to individual types in a natural way. If you don't like the auto-generated serializer for a given type foo, you can always just write your own, and it fits beautifully into the auto-generated serializers for types that include foo as a component.
The only downside is that you need to learn camlp4 to write one of these for yourself. But using them is quite easy, once you get your build-system set up to use the preprocessor. It's as simple as adding `with sexp` to the end of a type definition:
type t = { foo: int; bar: float }
with sexp
and now you have your serializer.
Problem
One of the huge benefits in languages that have some sort of reflection/introspecition is that objects can be automatically constructed from a variety of sources. For example, in Java I can use the same objects for persisting to a db (with Hibernate), serializing to XML (with JAXB), and serializing to JSON (json-lib). You can do the same in Ruby and Python also usually following some simple rules for properties or annotations for Java. Thus I don't need lots "Domain Transfer Objects". I can concentrate on the domain I am working in. It seems in very strict FP like Haskell and Ocaml this is not possible. Particularly Haskell. The only thing I have seen is doing some sort of preprocessing or meta-programming (ocaml). Is it just accepted that you have to do all the transformations from the bottom upwards? In other words you have to do lots of boring work to turn a data type in haskell into a JSON/XML/DB Row object and back again into a data object.