tychoish / birch

flexible, typesafe, BSON library. including basic mongodb wire protocol support and timeseries data format (ftdc).

birch -- Flexible Document Encoding and Manipulation Framework

Overview

birch, is a Go library for manipulating "documents." Documents are collections of key-value types with richly typed values, and in the same sense as the documents at the core of MongoDB's data model. Indeed, it is descended from an early version of the BSON library for the current MongoDB Go Driver; however, the goals of birch have diverged. birch exists to provide an API for creating and manipulating documents without using reflection or the MongoDB driver, without loosing type fidelity, while still producing valid BSON and JSON representations of a document.

In addition to document production, the birch package contains two other additional areas of functionality that build upon the core document manipulation layer:

• ftdc provides a document-based, columnar, format ideal for storing timeseries data. This package is useful for storing high resolution system or application metrics data. The format is highly compressed and the tools can support high volume data collection tools. This is the same format that the MongoDB service produces for its internal diagnostic data capture, and this package provides an API for reading and writing data in this format, as well as tools in support of creating metrics for this format.
• mrpc provides a set of low level tools for interacting with ""mongodb-wire-protocol" RPC services. This might be useful for writing fairly low-level interactions with MongoDB services, you might also be able to use this as the basis for providing the server half that is compatible with most MongoDB protocol implementations.

In most cases if you have Go objects that (structs, etc) that you want to convert to BSON you should use the Go driver's bson library. However, if you need to programatically interact with BSON and want a reasonable, type-safe, API for that, birch is may be the right thing!

API and Documentation

See the godoc for full API documentation.

Development

The API is stable, and the library is largely feature complete. The following areas may see some additional development:

• adding additional higher-level tools for interacting with timeseries data, including new collectors and first-class support for additional data formats.
• additional document and element constructors for new types and type-combinations, to improve the behavior of the birch.EC.Interface() constructor.

The existing API wouldn't change to add support for these features.