Protocol Buffers
By admin on Jan 5, 2011 in Programming
Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.
You write a .proto file like this:
message Person {
required int32 id = 1;
required string name = 2;
optional string email = 3;
}
Then you compile it with protoc, the protocol buffer compiler, to produce code in C++, Java, or Python.
Then, if you are using C++, you use that code like this:
Person person;
person.set_id(123);
person.set_name("Bob");
person.set_email("[email protected]");
fstream out("person.pb", ios::out | ios::binary | ios::trunc);
person.SerializeToOstream(&out);
out.close();
Or like this:
Person person;
fstream in("person.pb", ios::in | ios::binary);
if (!person.ParseFromIstream(&in)) {
cerr << "Failed to parse person.pb." << endl;
exit(1);
}
cout << "ID: " << person.id() << endl;
cout << "name: " << person.name() << endl;
if (person.has_email()) {
cout << "e-mail: " << person.email() << endl;
}
Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.
Protocol buffers have many advantages over XML for serializing structured data. Protocol buffers:
- are simpler
- are 3 to 10 times smaller
- are 20 to 100 times faster
- are less ambiguous
- generate data access classes that are easier to use programmatically
For more information, http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html
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