I need a standard package to move key,value pairs over a net connection: any tips?

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+2 Q:

I need a standard package to move key,value pairs over a net connection: any tips?

As I hate reinventing the wheel, I wonder if there are any commonly used packaged out there for doing hte simple job of communicating (key,value) pairs of data betweeen two network endpoints (probably TCP/IP is the most likely carrier). I would like something that works in any environment, which for me means Unix/Linux-style socket API written in C or maybe C++. Java is nice, but only Java makes it hard to integrate into binary programs. C# etc. is out due to the need to be portable to Linux hosts.

Is there such a beast?

+1 A:

Socket-level APIs are the way to go if you want complete portability. I suppose there are packages for each language that can do the proper bit-molding in both directions, but I'm not aware of any single package that is ported to all these languages.

Shachar 2008-10-28 07:31:17

+5 A:

Consider using JSON? There are libraries available for most programming languages.

tunaranch 2008-10-28 07:34:42

That looks like a very good candidate! Thanks!

jakobengblom2 2008-10-29 07:31:00

JSON is easy to decode in almost ANY language.. even if the Linux peer just saves it for something else to worry about. +1 , Good answer.

Tim Post 2009-02-27 15:41:54

+2 A:

Google has a data interchange format called Procotol Buffers you may want to consider.

JesperE 2008-10-28 07:45:53

That also looks like a good candidate... except that maybe the need to declare things is a problem if you want to build a generic receiver end that muxes out data to various receivers. And you don't want to rebuild all every time.

jakobengblom2 2008-10-29 07:32:22

I would guess that Protocol Buffers is (or can be made) much more efficient than JSON or YAML.

JesperE 2008-10-29 09:42:45

Can anyone say over-engineering?

Frank Krueger 2009-02-27 16:43:12

Yes. MSI is over-engineered. Corba is over-engineered. Protocol Buffers is not.

JesperE 2009-02-27 20:00:04

There's also bencoding. There's probably libraries (torrent libraries) that will parse it easily enough.

jdizzle 2009-02-27 15:37:44

+1 A:

netstrings are an old solution if you would like to have minimal overhead.

Martin Redmond 2009-02-27 15:48:04

Netstrings seems odd to me. The guy wrote a short paper describing how every C programmer transmits strings and then claims that they will secure the web? Am I missing something?

Frank Krueger 2009-02-27 16:40:54

If you know the length of a string before you begin to process it you can prevent one major security exploit: buffer overruns.

Martin Redmond 2009-02-27 18:03:07

ansaurus

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I need a standard package to move key,value pairs over a net connection: any tips?

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