The missing piece of the SDK is MesssageUtils. It deserves a dedicated section because it covers two major topics: serialization and QDataStream transactions.

We will start with the serialization. We already know that Message stores only an opaque QByteArray data member. As a consequence, the desired data has to be serialized as a QByteArray before being passed to Message.

If we take the example of a JobRequest object, it is not directly sent. We first put in in a generic Message object with the appropriate Message type. The following diagram summarizes the sequence of actions to be done:

The JobRequest object is first serialized to a QByteArray class; it is then passed to a Message instance which is in turn serialized to a final QByteArray. The deserialization process is the exact mirror of this sequence (from right to left).

Serializing data brings a lot of questions. How can we do it in a generic fashion? How do we handle the possible endianness of...