Protocol Buffers
Protocol Buffers are language-neutral, platform-neutral extensible mechanisms for serializing structured data.
message
Person
{
optional
string
name
=
1
;
optional
int32
id
=
2
;
optional
string
email
=
3
;
}
A proto definition.
// Java code
Person
john
=
Person
.
newBuilder
()
.
setId
(
1234
)
.
setName
(
"John Doe"
)
.
setEmail
(
"jdoe@example.com"
)
.
build
();
output
=
new
FileOutputStream
(
args
[
0
]
);
john
.
writeTo
(
output
);
Using a generated class to persist data.
// C++ code
Person
john
;
fstream
input
(
argv
[
1
],
ios
::
in
|
ios
::
binary
);
john
.
ParseFromIstream
(
&
input
);
id
=
john
.
id
();
name
=
john
.
name
();
email
=
john
.
email
();
Using a generated class to parse persisted data.
What Are Protocol Buffers?
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.
Pick Your Favorite Language
Protocol buffers support generated code in C++, C#, Dart, Go, Java,
Kotlin,
Objective-C, Python, and Ruby. With proto3, you can also work with PHP.
