How to serialise msgpack over http

Question

tl;dr: Is there an efficient way to convert a msgpack in Java and C# for transport over HTTP.

I've just discovered the msgpack data format. I use JSON just about everything I send over the wire between client and server (that uses HTTP), so I'm keen to try this format out.

I have the Java library and the C# library, but I want to transport msgpacks over HTTP. Is this the intended use, or is it more for a local format?

I noticed a couple of RPC implementations, but they're whole RPC servers.

Thoughts?

-Shane

Answer 1

Transport and encoding are two very different things and it's entirely up to you to choose which transport to use and what data encoding to use, depending on the needs of your application. Sending msgpack data over HTTP is a perfectly valid use case and it is possible, but keep in mind the following two points:

1. msgpack is a binary encoding, which means it needs to be serialized into bytes before sending, and deserialized from the received bytes on the other end. It also means that it is not human-readable (or writable, for that matters) so it's really hard to inspect (or generate by hand) the HTTP traffic.
2. unless you intend to stream msgpack-encoded data over HTTP, you'll incur a fairly high overhead cost since the HTTP header size will most likely greatly overshadow the size of the data you're sending. Note that this also applies to JSON, but to a lesser extent since JSON is not as efficient in its encoding.

As far as implementation goes, the sending side would have to serialize your msgpack object into a byte[] before sending it as the request body in your HTTP request. You'll need to set the HTTP Content-Type to application/x-msgpack as well. On the receiving end, read the request body from the input stream (you probably can get your hands on a ByteArrayInputStream and deserialize into your msgpack object).