Buffy The Byte Buffer Slayer

Buffy is a Clojure library to working with binary data, writing complete binary protocol implementations in Clojure, storing complex data structures in an off-heap cache, reading binary files and doing everything you would usually do with byte buffers.

Buffy is built on top of Netty byte buffers, which addresses many of the issues with java.util.ByteBuffer.

Main features

Buffy enables you to access buffers in the similar way you work with the regular Clojure data structures. You can get and set fields separately from one another, give names to different parts of binary representation and so on:

  • partial deserialization (read and deserialise parts of a byte buffer)
  • named access (access parts of your buffer by names)
  • composing/decomposing from key/value pairs
  • pretty hexdump
  • many useful default types that you can combine and extend easily

Data Types

Data types used in Buffy buffers include:

  • primitives, such as int32, boolean, byte, short, medium, float, and long
  • arbitrary-length string
  • byte arrays
  • composite types (combine multiple primitive values together)
  • repeated type (repeat any primitive arbitrary amount of times in payload)
  • enum type (for mapping between human-readable and binary representation of constants)

The Future of Buffy

Buffy has been serving us well for some time, and no major issues were revealed. However, until it reaches GA, we can’t rule breaking API changes out.

We are also very much behind on documentation.

Buffy is a ClojureWerkz Project

Buffy is part of the group of libraries known as ClojureWerkz, together with

  • Langohr, a Clojure client for RabbitMQ that embraces the AMQP 0.9.1 model
  • Cassaforte, a Clojure Cassandra client built around CQL
  • Elastisch, a minimalistic Clojure client for ElasticSearch
  • EEP, a Clojure event processing library
  • Meltdown, Clojure interface to Reactor
  • Monger, a Clojure MongoDB client for a more civilized age
  • Neocons, a client for the Neo4J REST API
  • Quartzite, a powerful scheduling library

and several others. If you like Buffy, you may also like our other projects.

Let us know what you think on Twitter or on the Clojure mailing list.

@ifesdjeen on behalf of the ClojureWerkz Team