Goals of stream protocol

• Minimize boiler plate code.
• Minimize amount of speed or space overhead when streaming data in or out.
• The CommonPoint application system provides support to flatten and resurrect objects of known type as well as of unknown type. Stream operations are designed to appear semantically different depending on whether or not the exact type of the object being streamed is known.
• Semantics for writing and reading instances of known data types look the same regardless of the instance type. Any instance in the system can be written the same way.
• Flatten and Resurrect functions are inverse functions and look symmetric.
• The interface makes the invocation of flattening an instance and restoring it look syntactically clean. The operations performed are clear from reading the code.