Comments on: Thrift vs. Protocol Buffers

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:20:16 +0000

Hi Amstel & Bruno,

Curious to hear a follow up from either of you how your embedded system implementation worked out. Basically I am echoing Bruno’s post here, hoping for a 2013 update.

Cheers

Dan

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:38:34 +0000

Very interesting, thanks Dirk! IIUC, they seem to be playing around with protobuf for implementing replication. I don’t think it is being used for actual data storage, right?

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:36:41 +0000

I believe you are correct that Thrift JS lib only supports the JSON transport right now.

By: huxi

huxi — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:51:19 +0000

Oh wow, you are absolutely right…
Thrift documentation is really lacking!

I wanted to give it a quick look but that’s a rather nice try at the moment. ;)
What interests me most is the JavaScript support of Thrift. Did I understand correctly that JS is only supporting JSON?

Cheers & thanks for your effort,
Joern.

By: Bruno Rijsman

Bruno Rijsman — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 20:45:06 +0000

Hi Amstel,

I also have a project which requires using protobuf in C (regular C, not C++).

How was your experience with using protobuf from C? Any particular issues or problems?

Which C API are you using for protobuf? Is it protobuf-c (http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-c/)? Can you comment on the quality of that API?

Thank you.

By: Dirk Eddelbuettel

Dirk Eddelbuettel — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 23:31:03 +0000

Nice post. Just one addendum as you asked for Protocol Buffer users: Drizzle (the new-ish DB from Brian Aker of MySQL fame et al) also uses Protocol Buffers.

By: cowtowncoder

cowtowncoder — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:38:54 +0000

Unless you use MongoDB and need BSON, I would not recommend using it. Plain old JSON is not much more verbose, is MUCH more widely supported; and performance is not much worse — in fact, for Java at least, BSON is pretty slow (due to lack of high-perf parser/generator implementations).
BSON is not even proper sub- or super-set of JSON: it does not support all JSON constructs (field name, value limitations), but extends it with a few new types. So can’t necessarily convert between the two reliably.

And JSON has much much wider framework support as well, if one really wants RPC (as opposed to simple REST-style interaction using JAX-RS).

But if you use Mongo, BSON may make sense.

By: Amstel

Amstel — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 12:32:18 +0000

We manufacture industrial data acquisition systems and have chosen Protocol Buffers for all of our configuration storage and data transmission in new products.

We love the beautiful simplicity of protobuf, the way it packs data almost as tightly as binary but keeps the extensibility of XML. Every byte matters to us because we are sending large amounts of data over low bandwidth links. It’s a real quality design.

We’re using it in C (that’s right, not C++) on embedded devices and Java on web apps and we’re just about to get started on the C# port for our desktop products.

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 22:48:59 +0000

Thanks for the kind words!

By: kriti shah

kriti shah — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:44:55 +0000

Thanks for such a nice and informative post.I wish more people can write like you.