Soooo, I discovered JSON. That looks a lot like SSS. Yeah. I’m not a JSON expert (IANAJSONE?) but I can tell there are some differences between their format and ours. Pros and cons, like any decision.

Our pros are that it’s a very basic storage method. It’s JSON light. So if JSON is fat-free XML, SSS is fat- and carbohydrate-free JSON.

So, SSS is a project of me and Maurice, and we also have a SourceForge site up, almost. The name SSS was taken already, so we went with something slightly more controversial. We were surprised nobody took the name/acronym we came up with yet!

In unrelated news, I’ve watched The Matrix tonight since what, 6 years or so? And it rocked even harder then when I was 12. Tears of joy coming down from my eyes when Neo OWNS so hard in the entry hall of the building. Epic.

So the parser was working, but it didn’t utilize C++ all the way. I’m trying to reduce the code and thus ease further development and maintainability.

Some hours later…

It is finished! As far as I can tell anyway.  It has a nice example app with it, here’s a (now already dated) sneak peek:

    prettyprint("Welcome to the SSS example app");
cout
<< "This application shows how easy it is to use SSS.\n"
<< "STF is a \"new\" way to store leveled data, just as XML can do, for example.\n"
<< "The format looks like a C(++) struct, which we think is easier to read than XML.\n"
<< "Each :{ is a node, a node has other nodes and values. The first node is unnamed.\n"
<< endl;

So what are you waiting for? Grab the source with example app from the SourceForge page (either checkout from the SVN or select “Browse SVN” -> “Download GNU tarball” (all the way down) ), and use this neat alternative to XML! More information after the break.

Its documentation is made with Doxygen (nice program by the way, never used it until today, and it creates nice documentation) and can be found here(with left explorer style bar) and here(without). With the documentation is the code for review by you, because I’d like some comments where I could improve. About half of it was first written by Maurice Bos of BosByte and then completely reviewed and altered by me. Then I added the other half. I tried to use C++’s features where I could, and I’m quite happy with the results.

So again, comments on the code are welcome! You can view the code in the documentation.

What did you say? How it looks?

Like this:

imthefirst: "The first value!"
name with spaces: "Names can contain spaces"
name
with
newlines: "And even newlines!"

test: {
    blah: "The value of [root].test.blah"
    newlines: "newlines and all their whitespace
             get stored"
    comment: This comment value contains some information about how to comment in SSS files.
    "You can place comment before the quotes, the parser will ignore it."
    output this: "This particular value is retrieved in the code."
    output child:
    Same goes for children. The parser ignores anything until a curly bracket is found. {
        info: "Awwwwwwright! Tree output oh yeah."
        coolness: "+20"
    }
    Array: { :"This" :"is" :"like" :"an" :"array" }

    2D array:
    {
            : { :"First" :"Row" }
            : { :"Second" :"Row" :"!" }
    }
}

But seriously, go check out the SF page, download the STFU and play around with it. It oozes simplicity.

Maurice and I were thinking of how to circumvent XML one more time, and Maurice came up with this format:

ideayaybox:{
  author:"nick overdijk"
  author:"maurice bos"
  description:
"blabla
   blabla"
  link:{
      file:       "blah"
      tag: "something"
      tag:"something"
  }
}

So, basically we have 2 types, values and lists (which can be seen as values). Values are between quotation marks, if you want a quotation mark inside a value, you need double quotation marks! A list starts with ‘{‘, and ends with ‘}’.

In the above example, ideayaybox consists of 2 authors, 1 description, and a list of links. Simple enough right?

Simple String Structures, taking over the world!