Show HN: ION, a JSON alternative – Versatile, compact, fast, binary data format
I think the most interesting difference to the usual serialization formats might be the copy and reference types. I&#x27;m a little bit undecided whether they might be a brilliant idea or not. The decision whether to support copy or not puts some extra effort in the serializer and deserializer, but the total result is the same that you can have as without a copy field mechanism. The support of cyclic references makes a big change, because you can&#x27;t directly model them with technologies. You might also have trouble using these data structures in some programming languages or libraries (e.g. if you are only using immutable types or want to use only value types). However for some kind of data it seems to make sense to support cyclic data, as GraphQL and Falcor have also added support for that.<p>I also don&#x27;t see that many use cases for the table structure. I have deployed thousands of RPC APIs into production, and I can&#x27;t recall having the need for it. And even if you need it, using an object with 2 arrays in it would be just fine.<p>I also looked through the IAP documentation (btw. bad name =&gt; ipod accessory protocol) because it&#x27;s quite related to what I&#x27;m working on. I think that the shown basic communication patterns are correct, but from the documentation I can&#x27;t really get a feeling what I could expect from an IAP library. Would it be some low level messaging system (like MQTT, ZeroMQ, etc.) or would higher level communication patterns (request&#x2F;response, notifications) also be built in. There are no predifined message formats for RPC listed in the documentation which would outline that. The WAMP specification (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wamp.ws" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wamp.ws</a>) e.g. makes it clearer what I could expect from such a protocol. I&#x27;m not sure whether we need a new low level messaging protocol or if the work should be more focused on adding higher level semantics on top if it.<p>E.g. I think some pattern that I really need in my domain is remote object synchronization, which means the status of an object on the server gets automatically pushed towards all interested client and is continously updated during changes (=&gt; e.g. to build something like Firebase). Of course one can built something like that on top of basic messages by defining subscribe and update messages in the API, but I&#x27;m wondering if it&#x27;s worthwhile to add something like that directly in the protocol. On the one hand this is also a special case of the subscription pattern which is also listed here, on the other hand it can not directly be implemented with the subscription possibilites of many message broker systems, because they won&#x27;t send you the current state of an object after subscription but will only forward you a message after the value changes for the next time.<p>The connection and sequence definition in IAP looks a little bit redudant to me on the first look. I really think there is a need for message ordering and you must support it. The question for me is then if you don&#x27;t need message ordering, why not put the message into a seperate channel and let channels&#x2F;streams always be ordered (like in HTTP&#x2F;2)? Overhead for channel creation? Or to setup channels during creation either as ordered or unordered and keep that for the lifetime of the channel?