Serialization Formats
The Xerox Network Systems Courier technology in the early 1980s influenced the first widely adopted standard. Sun Microsystems published the External Data Representation (XDR) in 1987.
In the late 1990s, a push to provide an alternative to the standard serialization protocols started: XML was used to produce a human readable text-based encoding. Such an encoding can be useful for persistent objects that may be read and understood by humans, or communicated to other systems regardless of programming language. It has the disadvantage of losing the more compact, byte-stream-based encoding, but by this point larger storage and transmission capacities made file size less of a concern than in the early days of computing. Binary XML has been proposed as a compromise which is not readable by plain-text editors, but is more compact than regular XML. In the 2000s, XML is often used for asynchronous transfer of structured data between client and server in Ajax web applications.
JSON is a more lightweight plain-text alternative to XML which is also commonly used for client-server communication in web applications. JSON is based on JavaScript syntax, but is supported in other programming languages as well.
Another alternative, YAML, is effectively a superset of JSON and includes features that make it more powerful for serialization, more "human friendly," and potentially more compact. These features include a notion of tagging data types, support for non-hierarchical data structures, the option to structure data with indentation, and multiple forms of scalar data quoting.
Another human-readable serialization format is the property list format used in NeXTSTEP, GNUstep, and Mac OS X Cocoa.
For large volume scientific datasets, such as satellite data and output of numerical climate, weather, or ocean models, specific binary serialization standards have been developed, e.g. HDF, netCDF and the older GRIB.
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