Serialization

The same considerations related to lowering image sizes to speed up transfers can be used for text files as well. So, let's have a quick overview of a typical format to transfer data over our client/server architecture. Until a couple of years ago, the XML format was the most used. Then developers changed it to JSON format. Both are human readable, but JSON is simpler to write because of its syntax. It has no need for tags and attributes. For these reasons, JSON is lighter and more preferred and used than XML.

JSON improvements

Google provide an easy-to-use library to handle JSON serialization and deserialization, called GSON. In principle, it uses reflection to find the getters and setters of a Java bean; then, if everything is in the right place inside the bean, it can be deserialized by providing just the wanted class, to create a new object filled with all the data inside the JSON file.

To improve serialization/deserialization performance and transfer timings, we need to improve...