Best way to serialize/unserialize objects in JavaScript?

Question

I have many JavaScript objects in my application, something like:

function Person(age) {
    this.age = age;
    this.isOld = function (){
        return thi         


        

Answer 1

I had a similar problem and since I couldn't find a sufficient solution, I also created a serialization library for javascript: https://github.com/wavesoft/jbb (as a matter of fact it's a bit more, since it's mainly intended for bundling resources)

It is close to Binary-JSON but it adds a couple of additional features, such as metadata for the objects being encoded and some extra optimizations like data de-duplication, cross-referencing to other bundles and structure-level compression.

However there is a catch: In order to keep the bundle size small there are no type information in the bundle. Such information are provided in a separate "profile" that describes your objects for encoding and decoding. For optimization reasons this information is given in a form of script.

But you can make your life easier using the gulp-jbb-profile (https://github.com/wavesoft/gulp-jbb-profile) utility for generating the encodeing/decoding scripts from simple YAML object specifications like this:

# The 'Person' object has the 'age' and 'isOld'
# properties
Person:
  properties:
    - age
    - isOld

For example you can have a look on the jbb-profile-three profile. When you have your profile ready, you can use JBB like this:

var JBBEncoder = require('jbb/encode');
var MyEncodeProfile = require('profile/profile-encode');

// Create a new bundle
var bundle = new JBBEncoder( 'path/to/bundle.jbb' );

// Add one or more profile(s) in order for JBB
// to understand your custom objects
bundle.addProfile(MyEncodeProfile);

// Encode your object(s) - They can be any valid
// javascript object, or objects described in
// the profiles you added previously.

var p1 = new Person(77);
bundle.encode( p1, 'person' );

var people = [
        new Person(45),
        new Person(77),
        ...
    ];
bundle.encode( people, 'people' );

// Close the bundle when you are done
bundle.close();

And you can read it back like this:

var JBBDecoder = require('jbb/decode');
var MyDecodeProfile = require('profile/profile-decode');

// Instantiate a new binary decoder
var binaryLoader = new JBBDecoder( 'path/to/bundle' );

// Add your decoding profile
binaryLoader.addProfile( MyDecodeProfile );

// Add one or more bundles to load
binaryLoader.add( 'bundle.jbb' );

// Load and callback when ready
binaryLoader.load(function( error, database ) {

    // Your objects are in the database
    // and ready to use!
    var people = database['people'];

});