Writing binary data between Java and Python

I have small project where server-side is done in Python and client is J2ME application and they have to talk to each other. At one time I had JSON to do it, it is quite easy on both sides, there are nice libs both for Java and Python. But recently, as traffic was growing and JSON performance on J2ME is not suitable for my tasks, I decided to try Java serialization with data streams.

For Java it is trivial:

DataOutputStream daos = new DataOutputStream(baos);
daos.writeLong(value1);
daos.writeInt(value2);
daos.writeBoolean(value3);
daos.writeUTF(value4);

In Python there is no such thing, but there is nice utility package called struct. It basically allows to read and write binary data and convert it into normal data. It is configurable and with small experimenting it is possible to find matching reading and writing functions for Java counterparts.

For example to parse example that is written above:

result = struct.unpack('>II', input1)
value1 = (result[0] << 32) + result[1]
result = struct.unpack('>i', input2)   // result[0] becomes value2
result = struct.unpack('>b', input3)   // result[0] is 1 for true and 0 for false

With strings it is a little bit trickier, because with method writeUTF, Java writes string length as 2 byte number and UTF-8 string. So in Python it is:

result = struct.unpack('>H', input4)
result = input5 // it is already acceptable for Python, just calculate result[0] bytes from input

Similar is also writing from Python to Java; same data formats are good for Java reading.

There is nice trick in Python, it allows to unpack and pack a lot of parameters simultaneously, for example this example above can be shortened to:

result = struct.unpack('>IIibH', input6)  // result array now contains all unpacked values except string