Develop Reference

Creating Binary Data Structures in Javascript

I'm building a web app, and need to be able to encode user-generated data as concisely as possible before transmitting it to my server. In the past I've used Flash, and it had a very neat system where for any class that you want to serialize, you could write a pair of functions that would describe exactly how to serialize the data. For example:
out.writeShort(session);
out.writeUnsignedInt(itemID);
out.writeObject(arbitraryData);
out.writeShort(score);
You would have to write an equivalent function to read bytes from the serialized data and build the class from it.
Once data is serialized it could be encoded into a Base64 string for safe network transmission to the server.
I can't figure out how to do this in Javascript? JSON is nice and easy but it's incredibly wasteful, sending all object key/value pairs, and unless I'm mistaken everything is encoded as a string? So the value false is encoded as the string "false"?
Any advice on how to implement this in Javascript would be greatly appreciated! Use of libraries is fine so long as they work both on Node and in browser.

Look at this answer. You can use BSON format (Binary JSON) and it doesn't have those features of JSON you mentioned.

How to do Javascript access a local database in txt format

I am newbie working on a 100% js prototype. It consist of 3 docs: an html page full of xml tags, a small dictionary in a text file format, and a js file with jquery.
The js needs to parse the xml tags (no problem here) and look into the mini-dictionary list for available translations.
Which is the best way to implement the mini-dictionary list. (No more than 50.000 records). Is there a way to load the list into a memory database and access it from js? Which is the usual path to take in this case? What is the simplest and machine-independent way to do this?
Any directions as to where should I research are greatly appreciated.

I would suggest encoding mini-dictionary with JSON data format, and then using AJAX to get that file and parse it. But then you are risking someone will just copy whole dictionary and steal your work.
That is, if you are not using server side language, like PHP. If you are using it, then just store everything into database and request just specific words with AJAX.

JSON to String on client side for ASP.NET Script Service?

From this site, I've learned that ASP.NET script services accepting JSON actually require them to be serialized JSON strings (see: "JSON, objects, and strings: oh my!" section of the link). Is there a quick and easy way to serialize them for ASP.NET AJAX consumption on the client side instead of trying to manually convert a bunch of existing objects to JSON-looking strings?
Thanks in advance!

You can use JSON.stringify() to serialize client-side objects for consumption in ASP.NET's Script Services.
Using that approach, you can map client-side objects to server-side objects very easily. ASP.NET will automatically handle converting the JSON to objects (or even collections of objects) for you.

The article writer is confusing Javascript objects with JSON strings. There is no such thing as a "JSON object".
Naturally if you try to send an object to a web service, it has to be serialised, as the request data can only contain text, not objects. The standard way of serialising data to be posted is URL encoding it, so that is what jQuery does.
There is no JSON serialisation built into Javascript or jQuery. You would have to do the serialising yourself or find a library that does it. Here are some options: Serializing to JSON in jQuery
Also, the data sent in the example is not valid JSON. It looks like this:
"{'fname':'dave', 'lname':'ward'}"
To be valid JSON it should look like this:
'{"fname":"dave", "lname":"ward"}'

Storing HTML in datastore and Decoding during XSL transformation

I'm trying to store html object tags for video players in a datastore. This data will be serialized and passed back to client javascript where it will be transformed and displayed in the browser to show the video. I need to be able to htmlDecode the data so that it is evaluated properly in the browser.
Any ideas how to accomplish this in javascript?

Grab your HTML code and run through one of the methods described in this article (I had good results with encodeURI). When ready to use - run it through the compatible decode method

One of my co-workers suggested the following solution:
http://www.strictly-software.com/htmlencode
This is a set of javascript libraries to encode and decode html.

Why not use the following method?
HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(...)
And then on the JavaScript side, use the following.
unescape(theEncodedHtml)

Converting XML-RPC to JSON in JavaScript

Can anyone recommend a lightweight JavaScript XML-RPC library?
After researching this a while ago, I couldn't find anything I was comfortable with, so I kinda ended up writing my own.
However, maybe that was stupid, as there must be something suitable out there!?
My own pseudo-library is mainly missing a way to turn an XML-RPC response into JSON - or rather, converting the respective responseXML to a JavaScript object (converting the data types as needed).
This isn't hard to do, but why reinvent the wheel...
Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I know this two libraries, that you can basically use to convert your XML-RPC responses to JSON:
XML to JSON Converter
xml2json.js

This seems to do what you (and I) want:
http://kuriositaet.de/javascript/jsxmlrpc.html
http://kuriositaet.de/javascript/xmlrpc.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsxmlrpc/

Another small XML to JSON (and vice versa) JavaScript library is here -> http://code.google.com/p/x2js/

I could use this too. Generic XML to Json is rather unconvenient for XML-RPC.