[erlang-questions] BERT encoding and WebSocket

[Mike Oxford]

A truly stripped down binary-protocol can be faster and leaner than JSON,
but for web-work JSON is highly preferred.  Why?  Javascript has zero tools
for handling binary data and PHP's binary support is all but non-existent.
mochijson2 is a good library for converting between erlang terms and JSON.

JSON is more word-y and takes up more bandwidth, sure, but most people
aren't uber-optimizing for 56k modems these days (exception: mobile.)
The ease of using JSON in Ruby + PHP + javascript + iOS + Android more than
makes up for the wire overhead.   And it's easier to read tcpdump/pcaps,
use existing tools like curl and read native traces/dumps.

If you're just using backend server-server, BERT is easier and protobufs is
smaller/more efficient.

I use JSON on the front, BERT on the back with protobufs for talking to
Riak.  I deprecated AMF and a custom binary protocol on the front due to
the above reasons.

-mox

On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Heinz N. Gies <heinz@REDACTED> wrote:

> I was thinking about the same,
> after some testing I went to use JSON it was smaller then BERT+base64 for
> my cases without it I had problems with transmissions.
>
> Regards,
> Heinz
> --
> Heinz N. Gies
> heinz@REDACTED
> http://licenser.net
>
> On Apr 10, 2012, at 04:26, ngocdaothanh wrote:
>
> > What is the best way to use BERT encoding (http://bert-rpc.org/) with
> > WebSocket?
> >
> > BERT is binary but WebSocket does not support binary at this moment.
> > Should I use base64 to encode BERT binary to normal string? Base64 has
> > 33% overhead (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64). How much space can
> > BERT save compared to JSON?
> > _______________________________________________
> > erlang-questions mailing list
> > erlang-questions@REDACTED
> > http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
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