Frequently Asked Questions

Q. What's the benefit from using JBB?

A. JBB helps you organise your resources in reusable bundles, while in the same time can optimally compact them in binary bundles. These bundles are faster to load (about 30% faster) and easier to share and reuse.

Q. Is this like .tar for web?

A. No! JBB is not an archive format, but a data serialization format with some bundling additions. This means that JBB aims to encode data structures in the most efficient manner possible, and if needed, it embeds resource blobs that cannot be further optimised. So please don't start packing only binary blobs in it.. it can do so much more :)

Q. How JBB compares to Binary-JSON (BSON)?

A. BSON can only encode primitive javascript data structures, such as arrays and plain objects. JBB on the other hand is aware of the objects being encoded, it preserves their type and encodes them more optimally.

Q. How JBB compares to MessagePack?

A. Both try to solve the same problem: to encode data structures. However JBB sticks closer to the native Javascript data types, making it faster to process in the browser, while in the same time provides an additional layer of type information and arbitrary resource embedding. Furthermore, JBB is optimised for size, performing data de-duplication and numeric downscaling when possible.