totodat

Totodat is a lightweight data interchange format and streaming protocol designed for real-time communications in distributed systems. It provides both a human-readable text encoding and a compact binary encoding to balance ease of debugging with efficiency for network transmission.

A totodat message has a simple structure: a header and a payload. The header carries version, topic, timestamp, and flags; the payload is a map-like data structure that may include nested objects and arrays. Totodat defines a small set of scalar types (null, boolean, integer, float, string) and composite types (array and object). A schema mechanism called Totodat Schema (TOS) allows optional validation and forward/backward compatibility, enabling changes without breaking existing consumers.

There are two encodings: totodat-text and totodat-b. The text form favors readability for development and inspection, while the binary form emphasizes compactness and parsing speed. Totodat supports streaming semantics with backpressure and is designed to work over HTTP/2, WebSocket, or TCP transports.

History and reception: totodat originated in the Totodat Initiative in the mid-2010s as an alternative to more complex formats for telemetry and event streams. It has not achieved wide industry standardization but has found niche use in projects needing simple, dual-encoding data exchange.

Applications and ecosystem: Totodat is used for telemetry, log streams, and event pipelines where lightweight tooling is desired. Language bindings exist for several platforms, and some brokers offer adapters or integrations.

See also: JSON, CBOR, Apache Kafka.