JSV Format

ServiceStack provides a fast, compact format called JSV:

JSV Text Format (JSON + CSV)

JSV is a text-based format that is optimized for both size and speed.

In many ways it is similar to JavaScript, e.g. any List, Array, Collection of ints, longs, etc are stored in exactly the same way, i.e:

[1,2,3,4,5]

Any IDictionary is serialized like JavaScript, i.e:

{A:1,B:2,C:3,D:4}

Which also happens to be the same as C# POCO class with the values

new MyClass { A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4 }

Which serializes to:

{A:1,B:2,C:3,D:4}

JSV is white-space significant, which means normal string values can be serialized without quotes, e.g:

new MyClass { Foo="Bar", Greet="Hello World!"}

is serialized as:

{Foo:Bar,Greet:Hello World!}

Any string with any of the following characters: []{}," is escaped using CSV-style escaping where the value is wrapped in double quotes, e.g:

new MyClass { Name = "Me, Junior" }

is serialized as:

{Name:"Me, Junior"}

A value with a double-quote is escaped with another double quote e.g:

new MyClass { Size = "2\" x 1\"" }

is serialized as:

{Size:"2"" x 1"""}

Thanks to the performance benefits of JSV's CSV-style escaping, the JsvServiceClient is our fastest text-based .NET ServiceClient:

var client = new JsvServiceClient(baseUrl);
var response = client.Get(new Hello { Name = "World" });

A JavaScript JSV parser is also available from JSV.js:

var jsv = JSV.stringify(model);
var dto = JSV.parse(jsv);

JSV.js also includes the JsvServiceClient for consuming JSV Services:

var client = new JsvServiceClient(baseUrl);
client.getFromService("Hello", { name: "World" }, 
    function(r) {
    });