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

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

Also, I believe this is the fifth binary encoding of JSON proposed
thus far.  Can we list the ones that have been proposed thus far?

Here's a [no-doubt partial] list:

 - BSON
 - MsgPack
 - Smile
 - UBJSON
 - CBOR

That's just the ones I recall seeing before or which I found in 30
seconds of searching.

Some of these are used in actual protocols right now.

An analysis of these might be nice.

(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.)

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've wanted to define a JSON Encoding Rules for ASN.1, primarily to
make debugging apps that use ASN.1-based protocols easier (dump PDUs
as ASN.1).)

Nico
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