[AVRO-1502] Avro objects should implement Serializable

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.8.0
• Component/s: java
• Hadoop Flags: Incompatible change
• Assignee: Doug Cutting
• Reporter: Jeff Hammerbacher
• Created: 04/May/14 18:29
• Updated: 15/Sep/21 14:09
• Resolved: 03/Oct/14 21:43

Description

To ease use of Avro objects with systems that rely on Java serialization, i.e. Apache Spark, this change updates generated classes to implement java.io.Externalizable.

This change is marked incompatible because the class hierarchy for SpecificFixed has changed. Updating the Avro library without recompiling the IPC classes (in my test this was for Flume) results in an AbstractMethodError.

(I couldn't add a Release Note since the jira is Closed, so I'm updating the description instead.)

Issue Links

• breaks: AVRO-2011 AbstractMethodError on version upgrade from 1.7.7 -->1.8.1
• is related to: SPARK-746 Automatically Use Avro Serialization for Avro Objects
• is related to: SPARK-16617 Upgrade to Avro 1.8.x
• relates to: AVRO-3208 [Java] Utf8 strings should be Serializable