"BSON" stands for "binary JSON" - a binary storage format that is JSON inspired.

This is the C++ implementation, developed by http://www.10gen.com/ for http://www.mongodb.org/. This distribution merely rips it out of the mongodb repository into its own.

Other BSON implementations are available for most languages at http://bsonspec.org.

Note that this is not yet ready for production. While all the majority of the code has been thoroughly tested in the mongodb distribution, this fork is not yet proved stable.

The build system here uses autotools. It is a bit unconventional: it hides all the autotools magic inside of build/, so all you have to do is:

make

=)

The top level Makefile will call configure and the generated Makefile (inside build/). The product is build/libbsoncpp.la. You can then link against it.

To install the library and headers in /usr/local, just run:

make install

You want to link against the library, and then:

#include <bson/bson.h>

Check out the headers, particularly bson.h. The project is not fully well setup though, so you may have to include other headers for now.

I am not quite sure what BSON's license is. I'll check with 10gen. mongodb carries both an Apache and a GNU-AGPL license (included in this dist).