I have basic beginning to a parser for the BSON spec: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/BSON It is basically a binary compressed form of JSON. The usage model should be general, but I intend to read this data over TCP. Currently my system is quite inefficient, I convert leading bytes to Int then switch based on that type that that Int represtents. I was wondering if there is a tool set that exists for this purpose. For instance, should I use Data.Binary and make my Binary instance of get and put use the BSON protocol? Or is that not correct? I also looked at Parsec.ByteString, but that seems to only have a file input mechanism, and tcp buffers may be out of its scope. Are there any other tools that I should look at? I'm sure similar things have been done before. Can anyone point me to some open, successful implementations that I could mimick? -- We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. - A. Einstein