What is Preon?
Preon is an open source Java library that can serialize Java objects into compact binary formats. It provides an alternative to text-based serialization protocols like JSON, XML, and YAML which can often result in bloated payloads.
Some key features and benefits of Preon include:
- Lightweight and compact binary format - Results in reduced bandwidth usage compared to text formats
- Good performance - Encoding and decoding is very fast
- Extensible data model - Support for pluggable bindings makes it flexible
- Integration with common protocols - Works well with transport layers like HTTP, STOMP etc.
- Easy to use API - Simple annotation-based configuration for defining schemas
Preon focuses on generating efficient and small binary payloads. So it works well for scenarios where bandwidth/storage optimization is important like web services, data streaming applications, client-server systems etc. The use of binary formats also improves security compared to human-readable text.
Some downsides are that binary data is not human-readable during debugging, and there is less community/tooling support compared to widely adopted protocols like JSON.
Overall, Preon is a lightweight library that excels at producing compact binary representations of object graphs in Java applications.