Filbert (@FilbertFs)

Introduction

Filbert is a simple BERT serializer and BERT-RPC client for .Net, written in F#.

What is BERT?

[BERT] (http://bert-rpc.org/) is a flexible binary serialization format using the same encoding format as Erlang's [external term format] (http://erlang.org/doc/apps/erts/erl_ext_dist.html) but supports only the following data types:

• SMALL_INTEGER_EXT (tag 97) : unsigned 8-bit integer.
• INTEGER_EXT (tag 98) : signed 32-bit integer in big-endian format (MSB first).
• FLOAT_EXT (tag 99) : a float stored in scientific string format, e.g. .ToString("e20").
• ATOM_EXT (tag 100) : an Erlang atom, the maximum allowed length for atom is 255.
• SMALL_TUPLE_EXT (tag 104) : a tuple with up to 255 elements.
• LARGE_TUPLE_EXT (tag 105) : same as SMALL_TUPLE_EXT but supports up to 4294967295 (uint.MaxValue) elements.
• NIL_EXT (tag 106) : represents an empty list.
• STRING_EXT (tag 107) : string does NOT have a corresponding Erlang representation, but is an optimization for sending lists of bytes, the maximum number of bytes in the string is 65534.
• LIST_EXT (tag 108) : a list of elements of any type specified in this list, supports up to 4294967295 elements. For the sake of simplicity, Filbert does not support improper lists ([a|b]) right now.
• BINARY_EXT (tag 109) : supports up to 4294967295 bytes.
• SMALL_BIG_EXT (tag 110) : big integer up to +/- 255*256^254.
• LARGE_BIG_EXT (tag 111) : big integer up to +/- 4294967295*256^4294967294!

In addition, BERT also specifies a number of complex types as tuples whose first item is the atom bert:

• nil : { bert, nil }, the equivalent of null/nil in other languages. (Erlang associated the primitive nil with the empty array [] only)
• boolean : { bert, true } or { bert, false } for true and false respectively.
• dictionary : { bert, dict, [{name, <<"Yan">>}, {nick, theburningmonk}] }, a dictionary is represented as a tuple with 3 items - the atoms bert and dict followed by a list of 2 item tuples each representing a key-value pair.
• time : { bert, time, 1255, 295581, 446228 }, equals to 1255 megaseconds (millions of secons) + 295581 seconds + 446228 microseconds (millionths of a second, or 10 ticks) since the Unix Epoch time (1970 Jan 1st).

How does it work?

Please see the [wiki page] (https://github.com/theburningmonk/Filbert/wiki) for a quick tutorial on how to use Filbert.

NuGet

Download and install Filbert using NuGet.

Maintainer(s)

• @theburningmonk

The default maintainer account for projects under "fsprojects" is @fsprojectsgit - F# Community Project Incubation Space (repo management)