UBF: Universal Binary Format. Joe Armstrong's UBF is intended as a tasteful alternative to the XML family of standards. It has three layers:

• Transport format - binary format for tree-structured data. This lowest level includes elementary datatypes like symbols, numbers, lists, "BLOBs" and so on. Although a binary format, it tends to be human readable.
• Type system - type definitions for structured schemas/grammars.
• Contracts - formal client/server protocol descriptions, which can be automatically enforced so that protocol violations are never seen by applications.

Described best in the paper Getting Erlang to talk to the outside world from the recent ACM SIGPLAN Erlang Workshop. A nice feature of UBF is that it is trivial to efficiently encode and decode: a parser can be written as a very neat stack machine, treating each input character as an instruction. It doesn't require any "parser stuff" like look-ahead, backtracking, etc.

[Lambda the Ultimate]

I was reading it just yesterday! Also check out YAWS.

9:34:14 AM  #