Is it possible to serialize a hierarchy of objects in Flex, send the binary data to a URL for storage/retrieval on/from a server, and deserialize the data to restore the objects' original state?
I know it's possible to convert the objects into an XML format (haven't tried it yet), but I'm hoping to avoid parsing XML and rebuilding the objects manually. It would be nice to have functionality which can serialize/deserialize objects to a simple binary format (I did something similar in the past in Java, though not quite as easily as I would have liked). The 'eval' function in Perl is similar to what I'm looking for, sans saving code, of course.
In pseudo-code, here's what I would like to do:
private var contentToSave:HBox = new HBox();
private function saveState(event:Event):void {
var toSave:HBox = this.contentToSave;
var data:? = /* serialize 'toSave' ActionScript classes to binary data*/;
sendDataToServer(data, filename);
}
private function restoreState(filename):void {
var data:? = getDataFromServer(filename);
var savedData:HBox = /* deserialize binary 'data' to ActionScript classes */;
this.contentToSave = savedData;
}