= Protopuffs!

A new implementation of Protocol Buffers in Ruby.

If you're not familiar with Protocol Buffers, start with Google's homepage: http://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)