On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 4:43 PM, Riyad Kalla <[email protected]> wrote: > Tim's work is certainly the catalyst for my excitement about the potential > here for Couch. > > As Paul pointed out, the correct discussion to have at this point is really > about "do we support a binary format for responses" and if so "which > one"? That discussion could go on for an eternity with everyone voting for > their favorite (protobuff, smile, messagepack, etc.). > > The only reason I bring up the "disk store format" discussion into this > conversion is to offer a hat-tip to a future where a binary response format > selected now may dovetail nicely with alternative binary disk formats, > enabling the stream-directly-from-disk scenario. > > If we were to hypothetically remove the possibility of the on-disk format > ever changing, then I suppose the decision of binary response format just > becomes an issue of "Which one is fast and easy to generate?". >
Quite right though I think you skipped a step which is "Are we capable of even generating alternate content-types?" I think we are with a minor amount of work. And I've tried to make suggestions that would allow for a fairly trivial switch (which have generally been accepted, minus that hugenum issue ;) Things get more complicated, if say, (flame suit donned) we decided to provide an XML response type. The issue here becomes less of a "can we write code that produces XML" to a "how do we represent this with XML" type bike shedding issue. Here Ubjson is so close to the JSON format that just merely producing it in all responses is the technical challenge. Once someone shows that's not insane, then there's a discussion to be had for moving forward. Or something.
