Mathias, you also don't need a binary protocol. XML would work. JSON too. But binary is faster and more compact. Same with the table construct. You can work around not having it, but now ION has it built in. You don't make the mistake of serializing an array of JSON objects because you are busy. The objects are serialized as an ION table - not a list of ION object fields. If you ever send an array of objects across the wire with ION (IAP Tools), you will be using the table mode automatically. You save bandwidth and parsing time automatically. Who don't want that - even if you don't need it?

Regarding Copy and Reference, the support for them is still not very good (= not automatic). But imagine your service executes an SQL JOIN query, and in that result a lot of objects are repeated (e.g. same zip + city for a lot of objects). The Copy field can be use to include the zip + city fields just once, and after that refer to them later with a Copy field. That is shorter than including them again. These two fields still need some work to have full support, but we are working on it.

Right now ION is the most well-defined part of IAP. The network protocol itself is still not 100¤ finalized. But, now that we are close to being done with ION (we still have extra fields to add as extended types), we can move forward with the IAP core protocols and semantic protocols. If we do not define a standard semantic protocol for remote object synchronization, IAP will be designed so that you can plug in your own semantic protocol to meet that need.