Preon; Binary Encoding for Dummies
Abstract
Contrary to widespread popular belief, only a fraction of the data on your disk and network is encoded in angle brackets. In fact, the more interesting things are encoded in a compressed binary way. Now, with XML, there is a wealth of libraries out there to bind documents to your application's object model. With binary encoded data however, you are pretty much left on your own, which is odd, since parsing binary compressed data is in fact considerably harder than parsing a markup language.
Preon intends to change that. It allows you declaratively bind a Java based object model to its compressed binary encoded representation. It aims to be to binary encoding formats what JAXB is to XML, and Hibernate to relational databases.
Preon buys you a lot. Simply declaring the mapping between the Java based representation and the encoded representation will give you the decoder, the encoder and even hyperlinked documentation on the encoding format. And it is readable documentation. Not JavaDoc of your classes, but a document that will carefully document every piece of your binary encoding format. , including its dependencies on other pieces. Needless to say that takes away a huge burden from the developer.
(See http://preon.sourceforge.net/)
Speaker
Wilfred Springer currently leads a team of developers in TomTom Mobile's R&D department. He held several positions at TomTom, and has been involved in the development of services such as MapShare and IQ Routes. Before joining TomTom, Wilfred worked for 6 years at Sun's Java Center Practice. He spoke at several conferences before, on various Java-related topics, and is actively participating in a number of open source projects. He lives in the Netherlands, together with his lovely wife and children.
