Ashish, I've been using XML picklers for serialization, which you might want to consider if you can handle a little extra CPU/data cost. I'm the author of hexpat-pickle, so this is a plug for my package. I lifted the idea wholesale from the HXT package. Handling changes in protocol version is really easy. I've been doing a lot of xpSomething = new `xpTryCatch` old where new = ... old = ... If the new encoding fails to parse, it tries the old one, and on transmission it uses the new one. I find it very quick and convenient to bang out a new pickler now that I'm familiar with it. You write your pickler and your unpickler with the same code - it works well. I am also working on hexpat-iteratee which is a lot more socket friendly since it doesn't use Haskell's lazy I/O. The learning curve increases a little bit with doing it that way, though. Steve On 13/05/10 05:15, Ashish Agarwal wrote:
Thanks for all the advice. It seems I should avoid making my types instances of Binary. In fact, this relates to another design issue I've been grappling with, supporting multiple versions of the protocol. Probably I'll need something like, putProtVersion1, putProtVersion2, etc. Or something along this line.