A Universal Binary Format library

About the Universal Binary Format (UBF)

From Joe Armstrong's UBF page:

UBF is a language for transporting and describing complex data structures across a network. It has three components:

• UBF(A) is a data transport format, roughly equivalent to well-formed XML.
• UBF(B) is a programming langauge for describing types in UBF(A) and protocols between clients and servers. UBF(B) is roughly equivalent to to Verified XML, XML-schemas, SOAP and WDSL.
• UBF(C) is a meta-level protocol between used between UBF servers.

About the UBF in Common Lisp implementation

This library currently implements a UBF(A) reader and writer. It can read data encoded in UBF from a stream and parse that into objects and write objects to a stream, UBF(A)-encoded.

It started as a 5-hour hack by Andreas Fuchs and grew into something a little larger. Since then, the library was released as (modified) BSD-licensed code.

Development and Bleeding-Edge Versions

I have chosen to use arch to keep track of revisions of this software. To check out from my development archive, get a recent TLA distribution and execute the following commands:

If this is the first time that you are using arch (don't worry, your e-mail address won't be sent around on the net. It's used for merge logs in your working directory), run:

      tla my-id "Your Name <your-email@domain>"
      

After that, register the UBF archive and check out the tree:

      tla register-archive http://common-lisp.net/project/ubf/{arch}/2004/
      tla get ubf--devo--1.0
      

This will give you a working directory called "ubf--devo--1.0--patch-NN", containing the most recent version of the UBF library. If you feel like renaming this directory, by all means, do so. To update your working directory, use

      tla update
      

in the working directory.