An example of using Scala's pickling library to store an instance of a non-trivial (nested case classes) type in a byte array and load it back. It comes from a simple prototype (yes the byte array is copied to deserialize the data) that stores some data in zookeeper.

pickling_example.scala

import scala.pickling._
import json._

import org.apache.curator.framework.{ CuratorFrameworkFactory }
import org.apache.curator.retry.{ ExponentialBackoffRetry }
import org.apache.zookeeper.CreateMode

abstract class State
case class Scheduled extends State

abstract class Event
case class TaskEvent(state: State) extends Event

val retryPolicy = new ExponentialBackoffRetry(1000, 3)
val client = CuratorFrameworkFactory.newClient("127.0.0.1:2181", retryPolicy);
client.start();

val stored_event = TaskEvent(Scheduled()).pickle.value.getBytes
val seq_path = "/tasks/task-"
val path = client.create().withMode(CreateMode.PERSISTENT_SEQUENTIAL).forPath(seq_path, TaskEvent(Scheduled()).pickle.value.getBytes)
val stored_event = client.getData().forPath(path)
val event = (new String(stored_event)).unpickle[TaskEvent]
// It returns a TaskEvent = TaskEvent(Scheduled())