Hi all,

I am currently looking for a solution to the following question:

In the Apache PLC4X (incubating) project we are implementing a lot of different 
industry protocols.
Each protocol sends packets following a particular format. For each of these we 
currently implement an internal model, serializers and parsers.
Till now this has been pure Java, but we are now starting to work on C++ and 
would like to add even more languages.

As we don’t want to manually keep in sync all of these implementations, my idea 
was to describe the data format in some form and have the parsers, serializers 
and the model generated from that.
So the implementation only has to take care of the plumbing and the 
state-machine of the protocol.

In Montreal I attended a great talk on DFDL and Daffodil, so I think DFDL in 
general would be a great fit.
Unfortunately we don’t want to parse any data format into an XML or DOM 
representation for performance reasons.

My ideal workflow would look like this:

  1.  For every protocol I define the DFDL documents describing the different 
types of messages for a given protocol
  2.  I define multiple protocol implementation modules (one for each language)
  3.  I use a maven plugin in each of these to generate the code for that 
particular language from those central DFDL definitions

Is this possible?
Is it planned to support this in the future?
What other options do you see for this sort of problem?

I am absolutely willing to get my hands dirty and help implement this, if you 
say: “Yes we want that too but haven’t managed to do that yet”.

Chris

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