Protocol Buffers

Protocol Buffers will not only help cut down the size of the transfer, but also improve the time it takes to encode and send it as well.

Developed at Google to help improve data transfers, Protocol Buffers is ideal for all RPC-based protocols and adjacent file formats.

Currently the library is considered the best in the business, being still used widely in production in Google's and many other companies products.

The package includes modules for C++, Java and Python applications.

Third-party ports of Protocol Buffers have been created by developers for languages like ActionScript, C, C#, Clojure, Common Lisp, D, Dart, Erlang, Go, JavaScript, Lua, MATLAB, OCaml, Objective-C, PHP, Perl, R, Ruby, Scala, Visual Basic, and many other more.

What is new in this release:

• C++:
• Fixed the frendship problem for old compilers to make the library now gcc 3 compatible again.
• Fixed vcprojects/extract_includes.bat to extract compiler/plugin.h.
• Java:
• Removed usages of JDK 1.6 only features to make the library now JDK 1.5 compatible again.
• Fixed a bug about negative enum values.
• serialVersionUID is now defined in generated messages for java serializing.
• Fixed protoc to use java.lang.Object, which makes "Object" now a valid message name again.
• Python:
• Experimental C++ implementation now requires C++ protobuf library installed.
• See the README.txt in the python directory for details.

What is new in version 2.3.0:

• C++:
• Various speed and code size optimizations.
• DynamicMessageFactory is now fully thread-safe.
• Message::Utf8DebugString() method is like DebugString() but avoids escaping UTF-8 bytes.
• Compiled-in message types can now contain dynamic extensions, through use of CodedInputStream::SetExtensionRegistry().
• Now compiles shared libraries (DLLs) by default on Cygwin and MinGW, to match other platforms. Use --disable-shared to avoid this.
• Java:
• parseDelimitedFrom() and mergeDelimitedFrom() now detect EOF and return false/null instead of throwing an exception.
• Fixed some initialization ordering bugs.
• Fixes for OpenJDK 7.
• Python:
• 10-25 times faster than 2.2.0, still pure-Python.
• Calling a mutating method on a sub-message always instantiates the message in its parent even if the mutating method doesn't actually mutate anything (e.g. parsing from an empty string).
• Expanded descriptors a bit.