Hi, I have consolidated all repositories where STON code lives so that they are now all in sync, and in sync with changes from Pharo 7. http://ss3.gemtalksystems.com/ss/STON/ http://smalltalkhub.com/mc/SvenVanCaekenberghe/STON/main/ https://github.com/svenvc/ston There are 2 CI builds https://travis-ci.org/svenvc/ston https://ci.inria.fr/pharo-contribution/job/STON/ The project's format will remain FileTree (until Tonel is supported on other Smalltalk implementations). Last week I applied a couple of changes that I wanted to apply for a long time. Traits are no longer used in the implementation (which should help porting to other Smalltalk implementations). More specifically the following are used (again) - Class>>#stonOn: - ClassDescription>>#stonContainsSubObjects - Metaclass>>#stonName - Metaclass>>#stonOn: instead of - TClass>>#stonOn: - TClassDescription>>#stonContainsSubObjects - TApplyingOnClassSide>>#stonName - TApplyingOnClassSide>>#stonOn: use #instanceSide instead of #theNonMetaClass in MetaClass>>#stonOn: Reorganised the packages with sub tags. Add support for Fraction and ScaledDecimal literals (not in JSON mode). Previously a float conversion meant there was a loss of information. Change the representation of Date to include a timezone offset (since the current Date implementation is sensitive to this). 2018-10-11Z 2018-10-11+00:00 2018-10-11+02:00 A missing timezone offset is interpreted as being the local timezone offset. Add more special representations for common value style objects. One of STON's goals is to be a human readable and human editable representation of an object graph while remaining 100% correct (not losing information). The following were added for this reason: MimeType and URL using ZnMimeType and ZnUrl respectively as simplified values. MimeType['application/json'] URL['https://pharo.org'] Color Color[#red] Color{#red:1.0,#green:0.0,#blue:0.0,#alpha:0.4} FileReferences to the DiskFileSystem (effectively normal files) FILE['/tmp/foo.txt'] Here is an example of how much difference that makes. Given the following Dictionary { #background->Color red. #workdir->'/tmp/pharo/work/' asFileReference. #home->'https://pharo.org/experimental' asUrl. #datatype->'application/json' asMIMEType } asDictionary Which contains real objects as its values. was serialised by STON BEFORE the changes as { #datatype : ZnMimeType { #main : 'application', #sub : 'json' }, #background : Color { #rgb : 1072693248, #cachedDepth : 32, #cachedBitPattern : Bitmap [ 4294901760 ], #alpha : 255 }, #home : ZnUrl { #scheme : #https, #host : 'pharo.org', #segments : OrderedCollection [ 'experimental' ] }, #workdir : FileReference { #filesystem : FileSystem { #store : MacStore { #maxFileNameLength : 255 } }, #path : AbsolutePath [ 'tmp', 'pharo', 'work' ] } } which is 100% correct, but not very human friendly. Now, AFTER the changes, the STON serialisation looks as follows: { #datatype : MimeType [ 'application/json' ], #background : Color [ #red ], #home : URL [ 'https://pharo.org/experimental' ], #workdir : FILE [ '/tmp/pharo/work' ] } which is a huge improvement, IMO. What do you think ? Comments, feedback, remarks ? Any other suggestions for other object that could use this treatment ? Sven