Storable Module

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Re: Storable Module by Anonymous Monk on Aug 24, 2011 at 22:30 UTC
It does what it purports to do :P Storable Storable - persistence for Perl data structures DESCRIPTION The Storable package brings persistence to your Perl data structures containing SCALAR, ARRAY, HASH or REF objects, i.e. anything that can be conveniently stored to disk and retrieved at a later time. ... serializing and deserializing. Serialization In computer science, in the context of data storage and transmission, serialization is the process of converting a data structure or object state into a format that can be stored (for example, in a file or memory buffer, or transmitted across a network connection link) and "resurrected" later in the same or another computer environment. So Storable lets you save data structures to disk. You want to use Storable when creating these data structures is expensive, like for cpan/cpanp. cpanp makes sourcefiles.s2.30.c0.9109.stored out of 01mailrc.txt.gz,02packages.details.txt.gz, 03modlist.data.gz `$ ls -loanh gz stored -rw-rw-rw- 1 0 181K 2011-08-24 04:05 01mailrc.txt.gz -rw-rw-rw- 1 0 1.1M 2011-08-24 04:05 02packages.details.txt.gz -rw-rw-rw- 1 0 190K 2011-08-24 04:05 03modlist.data.gz -rw-rw-rw- 1 0 23M 2011-08-16 23:06 sourcefiles.s2.30.c0.9109.stored` [download] and cpan makes a Metadata out of the same files `$ ls -loanh Metadata -rw-rw-rw- 1 0 16M 2011-08-13 09:15 Metadata` [download] cpan/cpanp use these files, when you're checking if you have the latest version of a module, who the author is, what other modules the author has ... Generating the data from the tarballs on each run would be expensive (read SLOW) cpan/cpanp typically update these files once a day	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Storable Module by cdarke (Prior) on Aug 25, 2011 at 08:18 UTC
I have to wonder why you are looking at Storable if you don't know what it does and you don't know why you would want to use it. Storable is used for storing data structures, such as hashes, in a binary file format. There's more than one way to do this, for example YAML. A useful feature of Statable is the dclone() method, which does a deep copy of a data structure. Copying a complex data structure (hash-of-arrays, for example) using an ordinary assignment will copy the references, so something like dclone() (or Clone) is needed.	[reply]


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