msgpack3

A speedy implementation of the MessagePack serialization protocol, written from scratch.

MessagePack offers significant advantages over other serialization protocols, such as JSON, as it encodes objects very compactly. For example, the following object:

var o = {
  a: {
    b: -123,
    c: 123
  },
  d: [
    "Augustine",
    "Emma",
    "Shai",
    "Leea"
  ]
};

Is packed into 39 bytes by msgpack3, and 63 bytes by the native JSON library. In this specific case, MessagePack was around 60% more space efficient. However, these kinds of savings are quite typical. In general, MessagePack messages are significantly more space efficient than JSON.

Disclaimer: At the moment, this implementation of MessagePack is NOT faster than node's native JSON library.

Installation

It's on npm:

$ npm install msgpack3

Usage

msgpack3 provides two functions, pack and unpack which, respectively, serialize and deserialize javascript objects.

msgpack.pack(obj)

Takes a javascript object as input and returns a buffer.

msgpack.unpack(buf)

Takes a buffer as input and returns a javascript object.

See the source code for more details.

Example

var msgpack = require("msgpack3"),
    assert = require("assert);

var a = { a: 123, b: [1, 2, 3] }

var buf = msgpack.pack(o);

var b = msgpack.unpack(buf);

assert.deepEqual(a, b);

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (C) 2012 by Siddharth Mahendraker

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.