Programming Ruby 3.3

Marshaling and Distributed Ruby

Ruby features the ability to serialize objects, letting you store them somewhere and reconstitute them when needed. You can use this facility, for instance, to save a tree of objects that represent some portion of the application state—a document, a CAD drawing, a piece of music, and so on.

Ruby calls this kind of serialization marshaling (think of railroad marshaling yards where individual cars are assembled in sequence into a complete train, which is then dispatched somewhere). Saving an object and some or all of its components is done using the method dump. Typically, you’ll dump an entire object tree starting with some given object. Later, you can reconstitute the object using load.

Here’s a short example. ...