5 items tagged “protocolbuffers”
2010
The MessagePack Project. A cross-language efficient binary-based serialization library—“It’s like JSON, but very fast and small”. Claims to outperform protocol buffers for at least some benchmarks.
2009
Introducing BERT and BERT-RPC. Justification for inventing a brand new serialisation protocol: Thrift and Protocol Buffers both use IDLs and code generation, XML “is not convertible to a simple unambiguous data structure in any language I’ve ever used” and JSON lacks support for unencoded binary data. The result is BERT—Binary ERlang Term—which extracts a format from Erlang in much the same way that JSON extracted one from JavaScript.
2008
simple-thrift-queue (via) Phillip Pearson’s surprisingly concise in-memory message queue written in Python using Facebook’s Thrift library (which is similar to Protocol Buffers, but was open sourced much earlier on). Handles 4,000 requests per second on a laptop.
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.
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.