更好地使用ObjectOut / InputStream或InputStreamReader / BufferedReader？

Question

So I made a chat application using InputStreamReader , BufferedReader and PrintWriter .

I'm wondering:

Would it be more efficient / better practice to use an ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutputStream ? Then I could send objects through like client information (not just Strings), right?

If so, how should I handle receiving an object? (Because it could be a String or it could be a Client object I'm sending) etc.

Answer 1

It would be a bad practice to use ObjectInputStream/ObjectOutputStream, because of the following 2 reasons:

• serializing objects introduces compatibility issues if you are using 2 versions of the chat program at the same time and each version uses another version of the serialized classes.
• serialized object contain a lot of metadata (save an object to a file and take a look) that has no functional meaning, so you would be sending a lot of "meaningless" data.

If you want to send object structures between your different chat applications, use Jackson ( https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson ) and:

• convert any object you send to a String
• convert any String you receive back to an object

Search the Internet how to use Jackson, this is one of the first links that showed up for me: https://www.mkyong.com/java/jackson-2-convert-java-object-to-from-json/