The Atomizer--Efficiently Streaming Object Structures

Dirk Riehle and Wolf Siberski

Dirk Riehle
UBILAB, Union Bank of Switzerland
Bahnhofstrasse 45, CH-8021 Zuerich
Switzerland

E-mail: riehle@ubilab.ubs.ch
http://www.ubs.com/ubilab
Tel: +41 1 234 2702
Fax: +41 1 236 4671

Abstract

The Atomizer pattern lets you efficiently stream objects into data
structures of your choice as well as create objects from such data
structures. The Atomizer pattern can be used whenever objects are
written to or read from flat files, relational database tables, RPC
buffers, etc.

Additional information

The Reader part of the pattern builds an object structure from a data
buffer. The Writer part of the pattern streams an existing object
structure into a data buffer. Both parts are specializations of the
Visitor pattern. However, the Atomizer pattern itself keeps recurring
as a pertinent design theme and offers many peculiarities and
interesting issues beyond the Visitor pattern which justify its
presentation as a pattern of its own.

The pattern can be found in more or less pure versions in probably
every framework that provides support for object streaming. However,
it develops its full potential only in the context of different
streaming backends.