Re: [apps-discuss] Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On May 23, 2013, at 18:13, Nico Williams <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Also, I believe this is the fifth binary encoding of JSON proposed
> thus far.  

1) CBOR is not a "binary encoding of JSON".
(It can be used as one, though.)

2) There are many more proposals in this space, and it is hard to draw a line.
E.g. Google protocol buffers is a prominent example.
Bencode is a great one, too.

> An analysis of these might be nice.

Yes.  Find a grad student :-)

Of course, I did my own analysis, but I didn't see a need to write it up.
(More specifically, I didn't see a funding agency interested in this part of reality.
But I'm willing to be surprised :-)

> (While you're at that, and considering variable length encodings of
> things... SQLite4 has some really neat variable length encodings of
> all its data types, specifically designed to make sorting via memcmp()
> possible.  I'm not sure what relevance that might have here, but it
> should be of interest to anyone designing variable length encodings of
> anything.)

If you are looking for a neat variable length encoding of integers designed to sort well, look no further than Appendix A.4 of draft-bormann-coap-misc.
But CBOR wasn't trying to be neat, it is trying to be practical.

> I do agree that we need a schema-less encoding (which means we can't
> get as good as PER and friends).  We probably don't need a
> schema-capable encoding for JSON (though that might be nice).  We do
> need schema-aware encodings for some protocols, but we have plenty
> already, and none are nor need to be JSONish.

I think we are in good agreement here.

Grüße, Carsten