These are protobuf source files that define the message format for all communication between the CONIKS test client and the basic server. They are based on Google Protobufs (proto2) and require you to have the protocol buffer compiler protoc installed.
Extensive documentation on developing protocol buffers can be found here.
A few additional quick tips:
- A .proto file can define multiple protobuf messages. In our case, c2s.proto defines all messages specific to communication between CONIKS servers and clients, and util.proto defines messages included in several different c2s protos.
- All fields of a protobuf should be optional or repeated (but never required). The official Protocol buffer documentation explains:
Required Is Forever You should be very careful about marking fields as required. If at some point you wish to stop writing or sending a required field, it will be problematic to change the field to an optional field – old readers will consider messages without this field to be incomplete and may reject or drop them unintentionally. You should consider writing application-specific custom validation routines for your buffers instead. Some engineers at Google have come to the conclusion that using required does more harm than good; they prefer to use only optional and repeated. However, this view is not universal.
- All .proto files for CONIKS should use org.coniks.coniks_common as their java_package, should use the same package, and reside within the same directory. This will make compilation a lot easier and avoid certain bugs.
-Prerequisites: You'll need to install protoc 2.6.1. Follow these instructions to install protoc. If you've cloned this repo, the protoc Java Runtime is already included in the coniks_common directory, so you don't need to install it again. -Compiling: Run the following command from this directory for each .proto file you want to compile into Java:
protoc --proto_path=. --java_out=../coniks_common/src <file>.proto
This command will automatically place the generated Java code in the appropriate package hierarchy in coniks_common/src.
Please keep in mind that this CONIKS Java implementation is under active development. The repository may contain experimental features that aren't fully tested. We recommend using a tagged release.