ActiveRecord in Rails 1.2.x has a method: serialize(attr_name, class_name = Object). I was wondering, given the new JSON serialization in 2.0, if it will be possible to request JSON instead of YAML when serializing data to a database column? Same goes for XML. It seems logical to modify the method to: serialize(column_name, options = {}).
Then you could do something like:
class User < ActiveRecord::Base serialize :preferences, :class_name => 'Hash', :format => :json end