Why lollipop?

There is so much good libraries for object serialization and validation. Why another one? Here are few reasons.

Agnostic

The library does not make any assumptions (other than standard practices in Python development) about structure of objects being serialized/deserialized. It makes it usable in wide variety of frameworks and applications.

Composability

The library consists of small building blocks that can be either used on their own or be composed into a complex data definition schemas. Be it a primitive type descriptor, a schema, validator - they all expose a small and simple interface, which allows easy composition and extension.

Separation of responsibilities

As in UNIX design, all building blocks focus on their particular task and strive to be best at it. That helps keeping interfaces simple. Type descriptors serialize particular types and that’s it: no optional values, no pre/post processing, no dump/load-only. Everything else can be added on top of them.

It’s all about objects

All your schema is just objects composed together. No (meta)classes, decorators, black magic. That makes it very easy to work with them, including understanding them, extending them, writing new combinators, generating new schemas right in runtime.

Validation

Validation is one of key use cases, so flexibility for reporting errors is given a great attention. Reporting single error, multiple errors for the same field, reporting errors for multiple fields at the same time is possible. See Validation for details.

In-place updates

Most of other libraries require all fields for validation to proceed and generally can only construct new objects ignoring use cases when users want to update existing objects. See Updating objects in-place for more information.