ProtoBuff

Description

Protocol buffers: language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible way of serializing structured data for use in communications procols, data storage, and more.

• Name-value pairs
• One or more unique numbered pairs
• Specify optional fields, required fields, repeated fields.

Compiler generates data access classes, which provides simple accessors for each field as well as methods to serialize/parse teh whole structure to/from raw bytes.

Running the compiler will generate class called persons.

General problems that protocol solves

Deals with index server request/response protocol, where hand marshalling/unmarshalling has to be done.

• Generates serialization and deserialization code for hand parsing.
• Being used for short-lived RPC

General Syntax

Data Types

• bool
• int32
• float
• double
• string

General Structure

message NameOfStructure { dataType nameField = val; }

dataType: 1 of above data types nameField: name of the field val: markers on each element that uniquely identify the unique tag that field uses in the binary encoding