Protopuffs!

A new implementation of Protocol Buffers in Ruby.

If you’re not familiar with Protocol Buffers, start with Google’s homepage: code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers

  Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible
  mechanism for serializing structured data -- think XML, but smaller, faster,
  and simpler.

Installation

Rubyforge is cuckoo for protopuffs.

  sudo gem install protopuffs

Usage

Start with a proto file, say, proto/animals.proto:

  message Bird {
    required string name = 1;
    optional string species = 2;
  }

First, require Protopuffs and tell it where your proto files are:

  require 'protopuffs'
  Protopuffs.proto_load_path << "proto"
  Protopuffs.load_message_classes

That makes the Bird message dynamically available in Ruby. Everything’s namespaced under Protopuffs::Message, which should help with your OCD.

  bird = Protopuffs::Message::Bird.new
  bird.name = "Sonny"
  bird.species = "Cuculus canorus"

  # encode this message to the super-efficient binary wire format
  binary_bird = bird.to_wire_format

  # or encode to the human-friendly text format, for debugging
  puts bird.inspect

You can also decode incoming binary wire-format messages:

  decoded_bird = Protopuffs::Message::Bird.new
  decoded_bird.from_wire_format(binary_bird)
  decoded_bird.name  # => "Sonny"

Mass-assignment

TODO: explain Message::Base.new with strings containing the wire format or hashes, as well as #attributes=

Missing functionality

Protopuffs currently only supports a base set of the .proto file syntax. Here’s what’s missing:

• the sfixed64 type
• sint32 and sint64 types (due to lack of support for ZigZag encoding)
• packed repeated fields (the [packed=true] option)
• enumerations
• importing definitions
• nested message types
• extensions
• nested extensions
• packages
• services
• built-in options
• custom options
• groups (deprecated)