What is protobuf serialization?

Protocol buffers, or Protobuf, is a binary format created by Google to serialize data between different services. Google made this protocol open source and now it provides support, out of the box, to the most common languages, like JavaScript, Java, C#, Ruby and others.

Should I use protobuf or JSON?

Protobuf is mostly useful for internal services whereas JSON is mostly useful for web applications. Prior knowledge of schema is essential in decoding Protobuf messages, whereas data can be easily decoded or parsed in JSON with knowing schemas in advance.

How do Protobufs work?

The Protobuf is a binary transfer format, meaning the data is transmitted as a binary. This improves the speed of transmission more than the raw string because it takes less space and bandwidth. Since the data is compressed, the CPU usage will also be less.

Does protobuf support inheritance?

Protobuf doesn’t support inheritance. Having a common header and using composition is the best solution. You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups “Protocol Buffers” group.

Is protobuf an IDL?

Protobuf as an IDL and encoding layer DCE/RPC, like Protobuf, is designed to be language- and platform-neutral. The appropriate libraries and utilities allow any language and platform to play in the DCE/RPC arena.

Is Protobuf widely used?

The design goals for Protocol Buffers emphasized simplicity and performance. In particular, it was designed to be smaller and faster than XML. Protocol Buffers are widely used at Google for storing and interchanging all kinds of structured information.

Why is composition over inheritance?

To favor composition over inheritance is a design principle that gives the design higher flexibility. It is more natural to build business-domain classes out of various components than trying to find commonality between them and creating a family tree.

What is the purpose of serialization?

Serialization is the process of converting an object into a stream of bytes to store the object or transmit it to memory, a database, or a file. Its main purpose is to save the state of an object in order to be able to recreate it when needed. The reverse process is called deserialization.

Should I use Protobuf?

We recommend you use Protobuf when: You need fast serialisation/deserialisation. Type safety is important. Schema adherence is required.

Does Protobuf preserve order?

Yes, repeated fields retain the order of items.

Which one is better inheritance or composition?

Composition offers better test-ability of a class than Inheritance. If one class consists of another class, you can easily construct a Mock Object representing a composed class for the sake of testing.

What types can be serialized in Protobuf?

Field types for common types (string, int, enum, date, datetime, JSON string), as well as custom fields The core base class for the serializer is ProtobufSerializer. There is also ProtobufDictSerializer to handle dict-like objects instead.

When to add Protobuf serializer to memcached?

The main idea is to add the ProtoBuf serializer before we put data into the Memcached server. We assumed that ProtoBuf compression would be much better than BinaryFormatter (Now we know).

What are the advantages of Protobuf over XML?

Another advantage is the size, as the Protobuf format is simplified, the files can reach 10 times smaller compared to XML. But the great benefit is its speed, which can reach 100 times faster than the standard XML serialization, all due to its optimized mechanism.

How do I declare a Protobuf class?

ProtoBuf can be declared two ways: Using attributes like [ProtoContract] for each Class that should be cached. Using a Meta implementation (based on Reflection). Example: var model = ProtoBuf.Meta.RuntimeTypeModel.Default; var serializableTypes = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetTypes();