deepstream.io VS concise-encoding

Deepstream is an open-source library for real-time web application development. The library, which is built with Node.js and Engine.io, helps developers build frontend web applications that perform real-time updates while requiring minimal backend code.

I'm working on a few projects, from one/two days to platforms.

The first is OS and is a simple nodeJS environment to deploy applications via lambda and express quickly. Sort of like nestJS except less decorators and more functional (https://vramework.io/). I already know of a few other colleagues that rolled their own propriety versions of this to support enterprise and cloud deployments so decided to OS it.

The other OS project is a strongly typed postgres/mysql driver. The idea is to generate typescript definitions directly from postgres (https://github.com/vramework/schemats) and then have a think layer ontop of pg-node that gives you strongly typed queries (https://github.com/vramework/postgres-typed).

An open-source project I spent a few years on the core team is https://deepstream.io/, a realtime-server that allows you to mix and match multiple streaming protocols (mqtt/websocket/others) and allow those clients to talk to each other using pub-sub and records. I'm not longer working for it but wanted to give it a shout out!

On a non OS project, I have been working on an immersive audio platform for a while now. The main goal is to allow users to pick and choose how audio books progress, and also have a live session mode which allows users to record their pulse / answer questions and a few other metrics and associate it with sentences. I pretty much built and deployed all of it but require some advice/brainstorming on how to proceed now. I built it to satisfy an itch when I was practicing shamanism during the first lockdown when I was in-between contracts / taking time off.

I also want to build a simple web-pages strategy game based around eco-education, but don't have the bandwidth . If anyone is interested in mixing together gamification and eco-village building might be a fun conversion to bounce ideas!

All the OS projects above were used to support my personal/a couple professional projects over the last few years.

Email in profile

I'm currently looking for a contract that is part-time that is focused on consultancy or smaller projects (such as setting up containerized AWS environments)

I am looking for part-time contract or freelance/consulting opportunities at the moment (up to 20 hours/week).

GitHub: https://github.com/yasserf

OS projects I am/was core maintainer of: https://vramework.io/ and https://deepstream.io/

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/yasserfadl

Email: [email protected]

https://deepstream.io is the closest and has a richer feature set (including a replicating document store), however it seems to have a small ecosystem / community / limited support options, and permissions do not seem as advanced.

https://nats.io is close but lower level. Has a large community and rich ecosystem however.

Then you can also mix and match lowever level technologies to achieve the particular set of tradeoffs you need. MQTT, AMQP as the protocol, mosquitto / rabbitmq/zeromq, then json-rpc on top ...

I can find socket.io, faye, deepstream.io , autobahn-js and nchan, centrifugo. Can you also explain why you chose it and if you had troubles with some other solution?

"Local time" is time zone metadata. I've written a fair bit about timekeeping, because the context of what you're capturing becomes very important: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

This is basically why I ended up rolling my own text date format for Concise Encoding: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 are fine for dates in the past, but they're not great as a general time format.

This looks similar to https://concise-encoding.org/

Dogma was developed as a consequence of trying to describe Concise Binary Encoding. The CBE spec used to look like the preserves binary spec, full of hex values, tables and various ad-hoc illustrations: https://preserves.dev/preserves-binary.html

Now the CBE formal description looks like this: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...

And the regular documentation looks like this: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/cb...

Dogma also does text formats (Concise Encoding has a text and binary format, so I needed a metalanguage that could do both in order to make it less jarring for a reader):

https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

Hey thanks for taking the time to critique!

I actually do have an ANTLR file that is about 90% of the way there ( https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/tree/master/an... ), so I could use those as a basis...

One thing I'm not sure about is how to define a BNF rule that says for example: "An identifier is a series of characters from unicode categories Cf, L, M, N, and these specific symbol characters". BNF feels very ASCII-centric...

It's still in the prerelease stage, but v1 will be released later this year. I'm mostly getting hits from China since they tend to be a lot more worried about security. I expect the rest of the world to catch on to the gaping security holes of JSON and friends in the next few years as the more sophisticated actors start taking advantage of them. For example https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

There are still a few things to do:

- Update enctool (https://github.com/kstenerud/enctool) to integrate https://cuelang.org so that there's at least a command line schema validator for CE.

- Update the grammar file (https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/tree/master/an...) because it's a bit out of date.

- Revamp the compliance tests to be themselves written in Concise Encoding (for example https://github.com/kstenerud/go-concise-encoding/blob/master... but I'll be simplifying the format some more). That way, we can run the same tests on all CE implementations instead of everyone coming up with their own. I'll move the test definitions to their own repo when they're done and then you can just submodule it.

I'm thinking that they should look more like:

    c1

Ugh Unicode has been the bane of my existence trying to write a text format spec. I started by trying to forbid certain characters to keep files editable and avoid Unicode rendering exploits (like hiding text, or making structured text behave differently than it looks), but in the end it became so much like herding cats that I had to just settle on https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ct...

Basically allow everything except some separators, most control chars, and some lookalike characters (which have to be updated as more characters are added to Unicode). It's not as clean as I'd like, but it's at least manageable this way.

You might get a kick out of Concise Encoding then (shameless plug). It focuses on security and consistency of behavior.

https://concise-encoding.org/

In particular:

* How to deal with unrepresentable values: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

* Mandatory limits and security considerations: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

* Consistent error classification and processing: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

In the above example, `&a:` means mark the next object and give it symbolic identifier "a". `$a` means look up the reference to symbolic identifier "a". So this is a map whose "recusive link" key is a pointer to the map itself. How this data is represented internally by the receiver of such a document (a table, a struct, etc) is up to the implementation.

> - Time zones: ASN.1 supports ISO 8601 time types, including specification of local or UTC time.

Yes, this is the major failing of ISO 8601: They don't have true time zones. It only uses UTC offsets, which are a bad idea for so many reasons. https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

> - Bin + txt: Again, I'm unclear on what you mean here, but ASN.1 has both binary and text-based encodings

Ah cool, didn't know about those.

> - Versioned: Also a little unclear to me

The intent is to specify the exact document formatting that the decoder can expect. For example we could in theory decide make CBE version 2 a bit-oriented format instead of byte-oriented in order to save space at the cost of processing time. It would be completely unreadable to a CBE 1 decoder, but since the document starts with 0x83 0x02 instead of 0x83 0x01, a CBE 1 decoder would say "I can't decode this" and a CBE 2 decoder would say "I can decode this".

With documents versioned to the spec, we can change even the fundamental structure of the format to deal with ANYTHING that might come up in future. Maybe a new security flaw in CBE 1 is discovered. Maybe a new data type becomes so popular that it would be crazy not to include it, etc. This avoids polluting the simpler encodings with deprecated types and bloating the format.