yit

#What are yit?

Yit are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for handle serialization in JavaScript. It should be used together with JSON.parse/JSON.stringify. Think Google protocol buffers, but for the web. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a JavaScript object.

#How do they work?

You specify how you want the information you're serializing to be structured by defining yit message objects. Each yit message is a small logical record of information, containing a series of name-value pairs. Here's a very basic example of a yit message object. It defines a message containing information about a person:

	var yit = require('yit');

	//	yit parse only JavaScript objects
	var message = yit.parse({

		message: {
			person: {
				name: {
					required: 'string',
					tag: 1
				},
				age: {
					optional: 'number',
					tag: 2,
					"default": 25
				}
			}
		}
	});

	var person = message.person();

	person.set_name('John Doe');
	console.log(person.name())	//	=> John Doe
	console.log(person.has_age())		//	false
	console.log(person.age())		//	=> 25 (default)

	//	serialize it into a string:
	var serialized = JSON.stringify(person.compose());
	console.log(serialized);
	
	//	parse it into a object again
	var john = message.person();
	john.parse(JSON.parse(serialized));

	console.log(john.equals(person)) // => true

As you can see, the message format is simple. For futher examples, check the "test" folder.

#Why not just use plain JSON?

Yit have many advantages over plain JSON for serializing structured data. Yit:

• are less ambiguous
• generate data access classes that are easier to use programmatically
• more compact than you probably would write yourself
• backward compatible - as long you use the same tags.

In JSON you will need to manually parse and validate each message. In Yit will you get autogenerated JavaScript classes to work with your message which will automatically handle error detection, serialization and de-serialization for you.

#Why not just use Google protocol buffers or any other binary format?

Yit was written because binary data is not suited for the web. Working with binary data in JavaScript is overly complex. If you program heavily in JavaScript, will yit probably be a much better fit than Google protocol buffers or any other binary format by the way.

#What about the browser?

Together with browserify, no problem.

#Install

To install yit, type:

	npm install yit

#Testing

To run the unit tests, type:

npm test

within the yit folder. You will need to make sure "mocha" is installed. If it would not be the case, you can just type:

npm install -g mocha 

To install it.