Contents

= 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, <tt>proto/animals.proto</tt>:

  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 <tt>Protopuffs::Message</tt>, 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 <tt>Message::Base.new</tt> with strings containing the wire format
or hashes, as well as <tt>#attributes=</tt>

== Missing functionality

Protopuffs currently only supports a base set of the <tt>.proto</tt> file
syntax. Here's what's missing:

* sfixed32 and sfixed64 types
* sint32 and sint64 types (due to lack of support for ZigZag encoding)
* packed repeated fields (the <tt>[packed=true]</tt> option)
* enumerations
* importing definitions
* nested message types
* extensions
* nested extensions
* packages
* services
* built-in options
* custom options
* groups (deprecated)

Version data entries

1 entries across 1 versions & 1 rubygems

Version	Path
chrisk-protopuffs-0.2.1	README.rdoc