21–30 of 131 posts
If someone better informed than me can please explain - where and why would something like Protocol Buffers be useful?
If someone better informed than me can please explain - where and why would something like Protocol Buffers be useful?
Google also has flatbuffers. I wonder if flatbuffers is being used by enough developers to justify significant development? https://github.com/google/flatbuffers
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible 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. From https://developers.google…
Yes, I read this. It tells me what Protocol Buffers are. Faster, Smaller XML like data structures for serialisation. What are the most common use cases though? And do people only use them for performance reasons?
"The main intent of introducing proto3 is to clean up protobuf before pushing the language as the foundation of Google's new API platform" Does anyone know if this means Google's public APIs will be proto3 based? I quite like protobufs.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/big-data/2016/03/announcing-gr...
If someone better informed than me can please explain - where and why would something like Protocol Buffers be useful?
Why is it useful? The schema both documents the data structure and allows mappings to natural APIs in many different languages. Parsers and encoders are generated for you, and are fast.
Google also has flatbuffers. I wonder if flatbuffers is being used by enough developers to justify significant development? https://github.com/google/flatbuffers
I think it's more that GRPC (Google's RPC-over-HTTP2 protocol) directly supports Protobuf, and not Flatbuffers. All of Google's Cloud APIs use Protobuf (for example the [Speech API]( https://cloud.google.com/speech/reference/rpc/ ) ). I have to say, GRPC is pretty great. It's statically typed, supports loads of languages, the interfaces are simple to define (basically Protobuf), and it supports streaming requests! Mo…
> primitive fields set to default values (0 for numeric fields, empty for string/bytes fields) will be skipped during serialization. I don't totally understand this. Presumably during deserialization they will be set to defaults and not missing? Otherwise, coupled with the removal of required fields, it seems impossible to actually send a 0-value number or empty string, or to send a proto without a field and not have…
Within the API, proto3 does not have the concept of field presence. All fields are "present" and default to their type's zero value. Since the client can handle this, there is no need to explicitly serialize default values.