Free and ready-to-use binary formats for use with own applications in Java [closed]

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Are there any ready-to-use and maintainted for a long time "universal" binary formats that I could use for free? I'm writing a game in Java and I considered writing own binary format to save maps to, but then I thought: maybe there're some solutions ready-to-use?

By "universal binary format" I mean format that will allow me to save any common structure (String, int, float, double, custom structures like Vector3f - 3 float values as one object, etc.), will be space, RAM and CPU-efficient and will have parser (and saver) written in Java.

Is there anything like this available? Or must I write my own format?

Answer 1

Hava a look at

• Protocol Buffers, also there a lot of third party addon's for protocol buffers. These addon's include utilities to convert to Xml/JSon etc, editor's etc
• Avro
• Thrift

There are also various performance comparisons about e.g. Benchmarking