EVIO — A lightweight object-oriented I/O package

The EVIO package implements I/O between disk and an in-memory hierarchical object tree. Tree nodes are either container nodes, holding other nodes, or leaf nodes, containing any amount of data of a single type (int64_t,..., int8_t, float, double, and string). Trees can easily be constructed using factory methods and stream operators; queried using STL-like algorithms, function object, etc; or modified using tree or node methods. The tree logically maps to XML, and utilities exist to transform between binary and ASCII XML formats. The binary representation is compact, I/O is simple and efficient, and endian conversions are handled automatically. EVIO will be used by the next generation of experiments at Jefferson Lab¹.