This thing is freakin' amazing!! I was quite surprised when it was announced out of the blue. Proto is very versatile and it saves lots of space. (: You guys should really try it if you had some time. It could be used for almost everything! Storing it as binary blob in database, inter-process communication (even over different computers and WAN), etc.
Cheers, On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 10:52 PM, Soh Kam Yung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > (http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/07/protocol-buffers-googles-data.html) > (http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html) > (http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/downloads/) > > ===== > Protocol Buffers: Google's Data Interchange Format > Monday, July 7, 2008 at 3:01 PM > By Kenton Varda, Software Engineering Team > > At Google, our mission is organizing all of the world's information. > We use literally thousands of different data formats to represent > networked messages between servers, index records in repositories, > geospatial datasets, and more. Most of these formats are structured, > not flat. This raises an important question: How do we encode it all? > > XML? No, that wouldn't work. As nice as XML is, it isn't going to be > efficient enough for this scale. When all of your machines and network > links are running at capacity, XML is an extremely expensive > proposition. Not to mention, writing code to work with the DOM tree > can sometimes become unwieldy. > > [...] > > Instead, we developed Protocol Buffers. Protocol Buffers allow you to > define simple data structures in a special definition language, then > compile them to produce classes to represent those structures in the > language of your choice. These classes come complete with > heavily-optimized code to parse and serialize your message in an > extremely compact format. Best of all, the classes are easy to use: > each field has simple "get" and "set" methods, and once you're ready, > serializing the whole thing to – or parsing it from – a byte array or > an I/O stream just takes a single method call. > > OK, I know what you're thinking: "Yet another IDL?" Yes, you could > call it that. But, IDLs in general have earned a reputation for being > hopelessly complicated. On the other hand, one of Protocol Buffers' > major design goals is simplicity. By sticking to a simple > lists-and-records model that solves the majority of problems and > resisting the desire to chase diminishing returns, we believe we have > created something that is powerful without being bloated. And, yes, it > is very fast – at least an order of magnitude faster than XML. > > And now, we're making Protocol Buffers available to the Open Source > community. We have seen how effective a solution they can be to > certain tasks, and wanted more people to be able to take advantage of > and build on this work. Take a look at the documentation, download the > code and let us know what you think. > ===== > -- > Soh Kam Yung > my Google Reader Shared links: > (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16851815156817689753) > my Google Reader Shared SFAS links: > (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/16851815156817689753/label/sfas) > > _______________________________________________ > Slugnet mailing list > [email protected] > http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq > http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet > -- Chris [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________ Slugnet mailing list [email protected] http://wiki.lugs.org.sg/LugsMailingListFaq http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet
