BISON: Binary JSON

Binary Interchange Standard and Object Notation (BISON) is a new binary format created by Kai Jäger.

After seeing the direction AJ(AX) was going into with light web service protocols like JSON, I was wondering if I could come up with an even lighter binary protocol that would work with JavaScript. Not so much to replace XML or JSON but more as a proof of concept and to see if it was even possible. I ran into a couple of problems (some of which I talk about in the article), but I actually managed to write a working implementation of the protocol. Essentially, you can now serialize any JavaScript variable into a string that holds a binary representation of whatever you had in that variable. This string may then be sent over XMLHTTPRequest to a script running on a web server. JavaScript and PHP implementations are available from my blog and there’s also a few demos.

I can’t wait for someone to write an XML wrapper of the binary protocol ;)