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Matthieu Monsch edited this page May 18, 2016 · 33 revisions

Overview

avsc is a pure JavaScript implementation of the Avro specification.

What is Avro?

Avro is a data serialization system. It is part of the Apache Software Foundation and is widely used both in offline systems (e.g. Hadoop) and online (e.g. Kafka).

Quoting the official documentation:

Avro provides:

  • Rich data structures.
  • A compact, fast, binary data format.
  • A container file, to store persistent data.
  • Remote procedure call (RPC).
  • Simple integration with dynamic languages. Code generation is not required to read or write data files nor to use or implement RPC protocols. Code generation as an optional optimization, only worth implementing for statically typed languages.

Browser usage

Compatibility table

Browser compatibility table

Distributions

Since not all of avsc's functionality is always used and keeping library size low is important for client-side libraries, avsc comes in multiple flavors. Depending on which module you require, you will get a different distribution:

  • 'avsc/etc/browser/avsc': the full distribution (~51kB minified and compressed), including serialization, protocols, and Avro file support. This is also the default distribution you get when you require('avsc') directly.
  • 'avsc/etc/browser/avsc-prototols': a slightly lighter distribution (~34kB) which doesn't include file support.
  • 'avsc/etc/browser/avsc-types': the lightest distribution (~20kB) which only includes serialization support.

In all the above cases, the core avsc libraries only represent a fraction of the total size (~15kB with everything included). If you were already using some of avsc's dependencies (e.g. 'events'), your bundle will increase by less than the sizes indicated.

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