We'll expand on our serialization techniques for the object representation started in Chapter 10, Serializing and Saving – JSON, YAML, Pickle, CSV, and XML. When we need to transmit an object, we perform some kind of REpresentational State Transfer (REST), which includes serializing a representation of the state of the object. This representation can then be transferred to another process (usually on another host computer); the receiving process can then build a version of the original object from the representation of the state and a local copy of the class definition.
Decomposing REST processing into the two aspects of representation and transfer lets us solve these problems independently. There are a variety of solutions that will lead to many workable combinations. We'll limit ourselves to two popular mechanisms: the RESTful...