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serialization.md

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Serialization

  • JSON
    • JSON is textual, its integers and floats can be slow to encode and decode. JSON is not designed for numbers. Also, Comparing strings in JSON can be slow.
  • BSON
    • Primary data representation for MongoDB.
  • MessagePack
    • IDL ( Interface Definition Language )
    • Message Pack supports streaming deserializers
    • This feature is useful for network communication
  • Protocol Buffer
    • Protocol Buffers (a.k.a., protobuf) are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data.
  • XML
  • CSV
  • YAML

Marshalling vs Serialization

  • Marshaling and serialization are loosely synonymous in the context of remote procedure calls, but semantically different as a matter of intent.

  • Marshaling is about getting parameters from here to there

  • Serialization is about copying structured data to or from a primitive form such as a byte stream.

  • In this sense, serialization is one means to perform marshaling, usually implementing pass-by-value semantics.

  • It is also possible for an object to be marshaled by reference, in which case the data on the wire is simply location information for the original object.

  • However, such an object may still be amenable to value serialization.

  • Marshalling

    • To marshal an object means to record its state and codebase(s) in such a way that when the marshaled object is unmarshalled, a copy of the original object is obtained.

  • Serialization

    • To serialize an object means to convert its state into a byte stream in such a way that the byte stream can be converted back into a copy of the object.

  • Which one to choose?

    • Some environments can have very fast serialization and deserialization to/from msgpack/protobuf's, others not so much.
    • In general, the more low-level the language/environment the better binary serialization will work.
    • And higher level languages (node.js, .Net, JVM) you will often see that JSON serialization is actually faster.
    • The question then becomes is your network overhead is more or less constrained than your memory / CPU.
    • With regards to msgpack vs bson vs protocol buffers. msgpack is the least bytes of the group, protocol buffers being about the same.
    • BSON defines more broad native types than the other two, and maybe a better match to your object mode, but this makes it more verbose.
    • Protocol buffers have the advantage of being designed to stream, which makes it a more natural format for a binary transfer/storage format.