Google Protocol Buffers: JavaScript Example

Is it a good choice to use Google Protocol Buffers in JavaScript or is it better to do it with JSON?

Also it'd be great if someone can give me a simple example about Protocol Buffers implementation in JavaScript. The documentation on the Google's site is scarce.

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5 Answers

[edit] Google's open source implementation of protocol buffers is available on github

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The official protobuf project support only Java, C++, and Python. Not Javascript.

According to the Wiki of the project, there are three projects porting protocol buffers to Javascript.

• Protobuf.js:
• protobuf-js:
• protojs:

Protobuf.js is up-to-date. protobuf-js has not been updated for two years, so I would favor Protobuf.js.

The question still is "Why"?: protobuf may be a bit smaller, especially when a lot of numeric values are transferred, but JSON is simply the more common protocol in the JS space and probably better supported and easier to integrate into other tools.

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Update (28/7/2016):Release 3.0.0 was published - supporting Javascript and other languages as well - in addition to some other features.

Google have recently added alpha support for JS to protobufs:

Usage:

protoc -I=$SRC_DIR --js_out=$DST_DIR $SRC_DIR/addressbook.proto

Screenshots from the release documentation:

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Protobuf 3.0.0 is out:

And it support JavaScript natively. The basic information is in the announcement.

We are going to look into it soon.

Yes, Protobuf supports javascript natively.

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Try Protostuff!

I had a bit of hard time configuring but I'm sure that was more of my issue. You can serialize/deserialize a protobuff/protostuff message to/from JSON. I'm at the early stages of using this but it looks promising so far.

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