[jira] [Created] (AVRO-1469) Support interchangeable object models

["Ryan Blue (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>]

Ryan Blue created AVRO-1469:
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             Summary: Support interchangeable object models
                 Key: AVRO-1469
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AVRO-1469
             Project: Avro
          Issue Type: New Feature
          Components: java
    Affects Versions: 1.7.6
            Reporter: Ryan Blue


The current way to use a different in-memory representation is to subclass one of the data modules, like {{GenericData}}, and override the relevant methods. This approach has a couple of drawbacks:
1. Because Reflect inherits from Generic, both must be subclassed and altered to preserve the choice between generic records and POJOs. This may have nothing to do with the object classes being changed (e.g., Map implementation).
2. Replacing the data class tends to also require replacing the DatumReader and DatumWriter implementation.

>From discussion on a related Kite issue, Doug writes:
bq. It's hard to know up front what bundles of functionality folks will need. We might add a separate interface that determines the representation of each type (records, maps, arrays, enums, strings, bytes, fixed, unions, numbers, etc.), then have generic/specific/reflect implementations for records, collection/array implementations for array, Utf8/String for string, tagged/untagged unions, etc. Currently we have one big interface (GenericData) for all of these, with a hierarchy of implementations that provide a few common combinations, but far fewer than are logically possible.

The use case I'd like to focus on is interchanging both the POJO/record model and the other objects independently. I think this follows from the distinction between Generic and Reflect and is a good starting point.



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