Re: [boost] JSON Archives for Boost.serialization

From: Esteve Fernandez (esteve_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-03-22 13:22:54

El Sábado 22 Marzo 2008 17:55:13 Jeremy Maitin-Shepard escribió:
> Thus, it is not clear what advantage a JSON-format archive would offer.
> The most obvious use for JSON is for communicating with a program
> written in JavaScript, but then it would be necessary to follow a
> particular format so that the JavaScript program could do something
> useful with the data, and therefore Boost Serialization is not the right
> tool for the job.

Although the JSON name doesn't hide its JavaScript roots, it's no longer 
constrained to that niche. JSON has found wide acceptance in other languages: 
Python has at least 4 different parsers and Robin linked to a Perl parser in 
a previous message, not to mention the Ruby, Java and PHP ones as well.

Boost.serialization not only deals with serialization, but with the inverse 
operation, that is transforming a previously serialized object in JSON back 
to its original form. So, what advantages can a JSON archive provide? Plenty, 
but the most common one is that it's more lightweight than the XML archive. 
If you take a look at another proposed GSoC project [1], using JSON as a 
transport protocol/format can benefit in less traffic while maintaining some 
degree of flexibility, since you could encode the messages in a different 
language if you feel like it (not necessarily C++)

BTW, also it's one of the projects proposed by Boost [2]

Cheers.

PS: Kasun, it's look like we're going to apply for the same project, so if you 
have in mind something bigger about JSON that we both could work on, it would 
be great

1 - http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2008/03/134589.php
2 - 
http://www.crystalclearsoftware.com/cgi-bin/boost_wiki/wiki.pl?Google_Summer_Of_Code_2008#json