Serialization in Tika 4.x

Use Jackson as much as possible with as few custom serializers and as few annotations as possible. Jackson dependencies are kept out of core modules to maintain flexibility.

Implementation uses friendly names like pdf-parser rather than full class names. These friendly names are applied to configured items rather than configuration class names.

The design permits users to add custom classes through Jackson’s polymorphic handling:

The approach seeks to make initialization and runtime configuration look exactly the same and use the same underlying code where possible. However, security constraints may require differences in which fields are modifiable at runtime.

Preference for config objects rather than field annotations to support multithreading. Parsers retrieve settings from ParseContext at runtime.

Configuration must pass seamlessly from:

Components that can be read via friendly names using @TikaComponent annotations in an other-config section.

The design maintains backwards compatibility by allowing ParseContext additions where the interface serves as the key.

Users can specify only updates to the initialization configuration through partial JSON objects, rather than requiring complete configuration documents.

In the pipes infrastructure, objects should configure themselves to avoid classloading dependencies on components like PDFParser.