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jsonwebsocketstreamingmultipartldjson

Choice of transports for JSON over TCP

I'm writing a simple streaming JSON service. It consists of JSON messages, sent intermittently, for a long period of time (weeks or months).

What is the best practise with regard to sending multiple JSON messages over a plain TCP socket?

Some alternatives I have looked at (and their downsides) are:

  1. newline separated JSON - downside: newlines within JSON require escaping, or prohibition
  2. websocket inspired 0x00 0xff framing - downside: it's now binary, not utf-8 anymore
  3. real websockets - downside: lack of (opensource) websocket client libraries
  4. http multipart http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc1341/7_2_Multipart.html - downside: incomplete client support?
  5. no delimiters - downside: chunking requires JSON parsing (can't just count curlies because of curlies in strings)

Is there a good, or at least well-established way of doing this?

Solution

  • I've codified what I and some other developers are doing:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Delimited_JSON

    It has the advantage of being netcat/telnet compatible.

    See also: http://ndjson.org/