Chapter 12. Transmitting and Sharing Objects

We'll expand on our serialization techniques for the object representation shown in Chapter 9, Serializing and Saving – JSON, YAML, Pickle, CSV, and XML. When we need to transmit an object, we're performing some kind of Representational State Transfer (REST). When we serialize an object, we're creating a representation of the state of an object. This representation can be transferred to another process (usually on another host computer); the other process can then build a version of the original object from the representation of the state and a local definition of the class.

We can perform REST processing in a number of ways. One aspect of it is the state representation that we can use. Another aspect is the protocol to control the transfer. We won't cover all of the combinations of these aspects. Instead, we'll focus on two combinations.

For internet transfers, we'll leverage the HTTP protocol to implement Create-Retrieve-Update-Delete (CRUD) processing...