Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Internet Object – A JSON alternative data serialization format

internetobject.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 83 posts

Re: Internet Object – A JSON alternative data serialization format

#6

Post by samhw »

danfritz wrote: post #2

Looks like CSV described. Gzip the json and don't care about the biggest selling point

Precisely. Many people don't realise how exceptionally well JSON compresses. Provided you're using it the way most do, to send arrays of objects which share the same set of keys (or some subset thereof), then all the keys will end up dictionary-coded away, thus totally eroding the space advantage that this format notionally has.

Plus JSON's exceptionally wide support means you can benefit from SIMD-assisted decoders which will absolutely blow this out of the water – and much, much more besides. I wish people would devote their time to something more useful than 'yet another competing standard'.

Edit: Sorry, I want to be clear, this is an impressive and cool personal project. I hope it's a step on an exciting journey for the person who wrote it. It just doesn't actually have enough strengths to replace JSON - which would be a tall order for any new format.

Re: Internet Object – A JSON alternative data serialization format

#7

Post by flqn »

I'm sceptical about the value proposition of this without seeing much more than a simple example that offers little over existing hypermedia+json/csv practices.

If a compact columnar representation is what you're after to avoid having to repeat every field name in an array of objects (which CSV is good for) but you don't want to give up the ability to include metadata in your JSON, there are a ton of different ways for structure your document to solve this issue without inventing new document formats.

Also this example is unclear (possibly ambiguous?); how is "int" as a type for the "age" column distinguished from "street", "city", etc as what I assume are field names?

Re: Internet Object – A JSON alternative data serialization format

#9

Post by samhw »

flqn wrote: post #7

I'm sceptical about the value proposition of this without seeing much more than a simple example that offers little over existing hypermedia+json/csv practices. If a compact columnar representation is what you're after to avoid having to repeat every field name in an array of objects (which CSV is good for) but you don't want to give up the ability to include metadata in your JSON, there are a ton of different ways f…

> If a compact columnar representation is what you're after to avoid having to repeat every field name in an array of objects (which CSV is good for)

Plus, as I wrote elsewhere, gzipping your JSON will result in essentially "avoiding having to repeat every field name" by dictionary coding it. The only case in which that wouldn't be true is when dealing with extremely unusual and heteromorphic data, but then this format doesn't seem to support such data at all.

I'm also mystified that the author claims this is readable. It looks eminently unreadable compared with JSON, if you have anything beyond one row of very simple data with all optional fields present. And, in that case, it's basically just 'JSON with the keys on a different row'.

(Congrats to the author, but this is more of a fun personal project rather than something to seriously present as a 'JSON killer'. If you do present it as a JSON killer, then you have to expect a rigorous review.)

Post reply on HN