Son: A minimal subset of JSON for machine-to-machine communication

Re:Son: A minimal subset of JSON for machine-to-machine comm... by heavenlyhash on Sunday December 10, 2017 @07:51AM (#15891186)

Roughly that it isn't shit.

I say that a bit tongue in cheek, but really: BSON has a monstrous amount of basic data types, some of which make very little sense and are very difficult to round-trip through other formats; and MessagePack had crippling basic sanity issues with what-are-bytes-vs-strings in its early history and that's something you simply can't recover from without declaring game over and making a new spec.

CBOR has neither of these issues. It's almost completely isomorphic to json, plus supports byte arrays. It's very nice.

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Re:Son: A minimal subset of JSON for machine-to-machine comm... by zbentley on Sunday December 10, 2017 @11:40AM (#15892144)

Does CBOR support lazy/partial deserialization? It's not a make-or-break feature, but the ability to pluck out individual fields from large MessagePack documents without deserializing the whole thing has been a significant performance/memory savings for me many times.

I haven't played with flatbuffers, but it probably supports this as well, given its design. Are there other binary protocols that have first-class (i.e. present with a good API in the client libraries for all major languages) support for lazy/partial deserialization?

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Re:Son: A minimal subset of JSON for machine-to-machine comm... by js8 on Sunday December 10, 2017 @02:13PM (#15892949)

CBOR is very similar to MsgPack, so yes (if you design the schema well enough).

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Re:Son: A minimal subset of JSON for machine-to-machine comm... by RantyDave on Sunday December 10, 2017 @11:31PM (#15895170)

More cbor ranting... In Python you can replace json.loads/dumps with cbor.loads/dumps with no further changes. Going back again may prove to be an issue when you discover just how much it is that json can't do.

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Re:Son: A minimal subset of JSON for machine-to-machine comm... by ci5er on Sunday December 10, 2017 @01:22PM (#15892673)

Is/Can CBOR be canonicalized (like ASN.1, for example) for the purpose of unambiguous generation and interpretation of hashes?

EDIT: I am happy to see that it handles date-time. Not really my favorite part of the non-spec of JSON on that front...

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Re:Son: A minimal subset of JSON for machine-to-machine comm... by heavenlyhash on Saturday December 23, 2017 @02:25PM (#15995771)

You might be interested in IPLD in particular: https://ipld.io/

They use CBOR as the underlying serialization, and have a deep interest in canonicalization and applications of hashing.

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Re:Son: A minimal subset of JSON for machine-to-machine comm... by roller on Sunday December 10, 2017 @09:33AM (#15891523)

In the feature category, I'd also mention direct support for unbounded collections. CBOR can be its own container format for streaming data.

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