Cereal

Cereal is a simple serialization library with pluggable backends. It supports serialization and byte appending with the Protobuf, Reader, and Java backends.

Cereal is still very much in the planning and experimentation stage, so things are likely to change on a whim very often. Be careful when relying on snapshots.

Getting it.

You can get Cereal from Clojars with cake. Just add this to your :dependencies:

[cereal "0.1.1"]

Usage

Pick a backend and encode some data! It's easy. Here is an REPL session using the Java serialization backend:

user=> (use '[cereal format java])
nil
user=> (def format (make))
#'user/format
user=> (encode format (range 10))
#<byte[] [B@71c1b2>
user=> (decode format *1)
(0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9)

Easy enough, right? Other backends will be just as easy.

Notes

Protobufs

To use the protobuf format, you need to depend on clojure-protobuf. You'd almost certainly want to do this anyway, because its cake plugin makes it really easy to work with protobufs. You should depend on whatever version of clojure-protobuf that cereal is tested with. You can find out what that version is by looking at its project.clj file.

Java backend

Unfortunately, Java serialization is quirky in Clojure. When you serialize booleans or structures containing booleans, what you get back when you unserialize the structure is basically useless. You get back a boolean that is neither true nor false. Keep this in mind if you use the Java backend.

You can fix those booleans by calling Boolean/valueOf on them. The fact that you even have to is annoying though. I'd make cereal walk through the output of decode and fix them itself, but that would destroy lazy sequences.