BooPickle
BooPickle is the fastest and most size efficient serialization (aka pickling) library that works on both Scala and Scala.js. It encodes into a binary format instead of the more customary JSON. A binary format brings efficiency gains in both size and speed, at the cost of legibility of the encoded data. BooPickle borrows heavily from both uPickle and Prickle so special thanks to Li Haoyi and Ben Hutchison for those two great libraries!
Features
- Supports both Scala and Scala.js (no reflection!)
- Serialization support for all primitives, collections, options, tuples and case classes (including class hierarchies)
- User-definable custom serializers
- Transforming serializers to simplify serializing non-case classes
- Handles references and deduplication of identical objects
- Very fast
- Very efficient coding
- Low memory usage, no intermediate structures needed
- Zero dependencies
- Scala 2.11/2.12
- All modern browsers are supported (not IE9 and below, though)
What is it good for?
BooPickle is not a very generic serialization library, so you should think carefully before using it in your application. Typical good and bad use cases are listed below.
| Good | Bad |
|---|---|
| Mobile client/server communication | Public API for your service |
| Data transfer over Websocket binary protocol | Data storage (you will lose it if something changes!) |
| Scala <-> Scala communication | Scala <-> some-other-language communication |
| Clients with limited resources | Communication between server components |