BORN

Binary object representation notation is a full JSON analogue but for binary world. It supports the same data types except of two Date and Buffer.

Reason

The main reason of creating new binary data is simplification of interprocess communications like IPC, RPC and so. Standard JSON does not support binary data and could transfer data in base64 with huge overloads.

BORN is dead simple and has no compatibility breaking extensions. Also it has no custom types.

Principles

• simplicity no environment dependencies like undefined or infinity.
• clearence - it has only basic types and relies on existing standards like ISO Date 8601 for date representation.
• efficiency – variable length elements has optional length parameter for fast seeking and editing.

Implementation

This is the first experimental implementation in pure JavaScript and it's already faster then CBOR (on encode/decode) and a little bit faster then MsgPack written in C++ (on decode, but not encode yet). So I believe it has a potential to future optimization.

NOTE Alpha version does not support int64 numbers.

Types

All types separated into 4 groups:

• Primitives like null, true or false.
• Numbers like integer and float.
• Sets and complex objects: object, array, string, buffer and typed object
• Other types like Date.

NULL

0x00 - NULL type byte

True

0x01 - Boolean true type byte

False

0x02 - Boolean true type byte

Positive integer

0x20 - Positive integer type byte
00 00 00 00 - uint32 - Absolute integer value

Negative integer

0x21 - Negative integer type byte
00 00 00 00 - uint32 - Absolute integer value

Positive float

0x20 - Positive float type byte
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - double - Absolute float value

Negative float

0x21 - Negative float type byte
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 - double - Absolute float value

Object

0x40 - Object type byte
00 00 00 00 - uint32 - Object keys length.
00 00 00 00 - uint32 - Object bytes length. Null if unknown.
... - Data key pairs

Typed Object

0x4a - Typed object byte
00 x 16 – 16 bytes length string – Object type string name.
... – Custom object bytes

Array

0x41 - Array type byte
00 00 00 00 - uint32 - Array items length
00 00 00 00 - uint32 - Array bytes length. Null if unknown.
... - Data values

Buffer

0x42 - Buffer type byte
00 00 00 00 - uint32 - Buffer bytes length.
... - Buffer bytes

String

0x43 - String type byte
00 00 00 00 - uint32 - String bytes length.
... - Chars

Date

Date stored as a string representation of ISO Date. It has format YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.msZ.

0x60 - Date type byte
... - [28]byte - Date ISO string.