compactr

Compactr

Schema based serialization made easy

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What is this and why does it matter?

Protocol Buffers are awesome. Having schemas to deflate and inflate data while maintaining some kind of validation is a great concept. Compactr's goal is to build on that to better suit the Javascript ecosystem.

More

Install

    npm install compactr

Implementation

const Compactr = require('compactr');

// Defining a schema
const userSchema = Compactr.schema({ 
	id: { type: 'number' },
	name: { type: 'string' }
});



// Encoding
userSchema.write({ id: 123, name: 'John' });

// Get the header bytes
const header = userSchema.headerBuffer();

// Get the content bytes 
const partial = userSchema.contentBuffer();

// Get the full payload (header + content bytes)
const buffer = userSchema.buffer();




// Decoding a full payload
const content = userSchema.read(buffer);

// Decoding a partial payload (content)
const content = userSchema.readContent(partial);

Speed comparison

Measured against plain JSON serialization + convertion to buffer. Compactr serialization is performed with default settings via the partial (content only) load method

Size comparison

JSON: {"id":123,"name":"John"}: 24 bytes

Compactr (full): <Buffer 02 00 01 01 04 7b 4a 6f 68 6e>: 10 bytes

Compactr (partial): <Buffer 7b 4a 6f 68 6e>: 5 bytes

Protocol details

Data types

Type	Count bytes	Byte size
boolean	0	1
number	0	8
int8	0	1
int16	0	2
int32	0	4
double	0	8
string	1	2/char
char8	1	1/char
char16	1	2/char
char32	1	4/char
array	1	(x)/entry
object	1	(x)
unsigned	0	8
unsigned8	0	1
unsigned16	0	2
unsigned32	0	4

• Count bytes range can be specified per-item in the schema*

See the full Compactr protocol

Want to help ?

You are awesome! Open an issue on this project, identifying the feature that you want to tackle and we'll take the discussion there!

License

Apache 2.0 (c) 2017 Frederic Charette