This package started out with the hope of satisfying some specific need for a given project. The first version was committed once that need was satisfied. So far, it makes no claims of completeness or correctness. But if you need to deserialize some Java objects using JavaScript, then you might prefer building on that over starting from scratch.

var javaDeserialization = require("java-deserialization");
var objects = javaDeserialization.parse(buf);

Each object in objects will contain the values of its “normal” fields as properties, and two hidden properties. One is called class and represents the class of the object, with super pointing at its parent class. The other is extends which is a map from fully qualified class names to the fields associated with that class. If one wants to inspect the private field of some specific class, using extends will help in cases where a more derived class contains another field of the same name. The names class and extends were deliberately chosen in such a way that they are keywords in Java and won't occur in normal field names. The properties are non-enumerable, so they won't show up in enumerations and e.g. util.inspect won't show them by default.

If the class contained custom serialization code, the output from that is collected in a special property called @. One can write post-processing code to reformat the data from that list. Such code has already been added for the following types:

• java.util.ArrayList – extracts a list field which is an ES Array
• java.util.ArrayDeque – extracts a list field
• java.util.Hashtable – extracts a map field which is an ES6 Map and an obj for String-valued keys
• java.util.HashMap – map and obj just as Hashtable
• java.util.EnumMap – map and obj, the latter with enum constant names as keys
• java.util.HashSet – extracts a set field which is an ES6 Set

Bug reports, suggestions, code contributions and the likes should go to the project's GitHub page.