Tuesday, 8th July 2008
Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format. Open sourced today. Highly efficient binary protocol for storing and transmitting structured data between C++, Java and Python. Uses a .proto file describing the data structure which is compiled to classes in those languages for serializing and deserializing. 3-10 times smaller and 20-100 times faster than XML.
Question: how do you upgrade servers when you need to pass new information between them? It's a fool's game to try to upgrade both servers at the same time. So you need a communication protocol that is not only backward compatible (a new server can speak the old protocol) but also forward compatible (an old server can speak the new protocol). Protocol Buffers provide that because new additions to the protocol can be ignored by the old server.
Apple just gave out my Apple ID password because someone asked. “am forget my password of mac,did you give me password on new email marko.[redacted] @yahoo.com”. Classy.
Opera Web Standards Curriculum. Opera commissioned an impressive sequence of articles from a bunch of very talented people to help address the monstrous learning curve for modern client-side development.