WARNING

bream is currently in pre-alpha development, and does NOT yet have a stable serialisation format.

Any release in the 0.0.x series may contain breaking changes.

Please do test-drive and give feedback, or else check back soon for a stable version!

END WARNING

bream

bream is an explictly versioned encode/decode framework targetting JSON-like trees.

Goals and non-goals

bream aims to be the following:

• Simple: encode to a human-readable JSON tree.
• Explicit: no silent conversion. User-provided versions, easy upgrades.
• Modular: bring-your-own codecs.

It does not aim to be fast. Speed isn't a current design goal.

Data structure

A JSON-like tree is a nested combination of dict (with str keys only), list, int, float, str, bool and None.

An bream tree is a dict with some metadata and a payload; any valid JSON tree is a valid payload. For example:

{
    "_bream_spec": 1,
    "_payload": {
        "serialised": ["data", "goes", "here"]
    }
}

Any JSON tree is a valid bream payload.

Encoded objects

Certain JSON trees within a payload represent 'encoded' Python objects. Any such tree is a dict with a particular structure. Here's how complex(0.123, 0.456) might be encoded:

{
    "_type_label": "complex",
    "_version": 1,
    "_payload": {
        "real": 0.123,
        "imag": 0.456
    }
}

The three top-level fields are special:

• _type_label is a unique label for the type.
• _version is incremented whenever the structure of _payload needs to change.
• _payload is some JSON data (that may or may not be a dict).

A Coder is an object which knows how to convert from the payload back to a Python object.

Advantages of versioning

The main advantage of explicitly encoding & decoding your objects with bream is the ability to version the encoded form, and then provide a "compatibility decode" pathway to decode an older encoded representation into the latest in-memory representation.

This also means that upgrading an 'old' file on disk is as simple as decoding then encoding again.

Separating the Coders from the type being encoded also has the advantage that you can write custom serialisation for builtin or third-party types not under your direct control.