Sep 01 2008
Predictable Binary Representation (PBR)
XML is nice, YAML and JSON are cool, proprietary formats for binary encapsulation are not good; those are all facts that many people agree to.
But they all the good solutions remain sub-optimal when it comes to network bandwidth overhead and cpu usage needed to parse the blob every time.
This might have, and should have been considered long time ago. I didn’t find any open format to cover it however, hence I’m suggesting one…
Features
The following needs are not addressed by those data representation formats, but are by PBR :
1. Supporting Binary content. You need to revert to Base64 or the like to do this. but its not natively supported.
2. Completly Predictable (so no guess work in parsing). I don’t want to waste cpu cycles and logic to parse the content in an unpredicable manner. I want to be able to exactly tell what the next step a head and how much data I need to manage.
3. No escaping. I really don’t like escaping. I want to be able to put my content AS IS ™.
4. Reliable : Checksum. Thats a cool addition that will make me confident of my data.