[rabbitmq-discuss] GPB and AMQP/RabbitMQ

Thu Mar 26 14:59:54 GMT 2009

On Mar 25, 2009, at 5:39 PM, Kirk Wylie wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 9:32 PM, Elsner, Robert
>
>
>> The one factor I don't like about GPB is that it isn't self- 
>> describing,
>> to really understand a message one needs the .proto or the code
>> generated from it.  For something like AMQP it might be more useful  
>> to
>> the community to pick a binary wireformat that encodes well, which  
>> also
>> self-describes its message.
>
> This is where some work that I did at my last job may pay off.
> Essentially, we rolled our own packed, binary, self-describing,
> hierarchical message format. Extremely compact (minimum 10 bytes
> overhead), fields were all self-describing with type information,
> everything was easy to map into direct CPUs (no varints), and fully
> hierarchical. Unfortunately that implementation is trapped at the
> former employer, but they've given the go-ahead to support a cleanroom
> implementation of the encoding and tools in the open source arena (and
> plan on helping with the effort, since they don't want to own it long
> term).

You two might be interested in something I ran across a few weeks ago.  
It's a self-describing binary protocol (exprot) up on github. You can  
read about it here [1]. There are already implementations in OCamel  
and Ruby. I'm sure it wouldn't be too tough to do others.

That link points to the first article. There are others on that blog  
that follow it up.

cr

[1] http://eigenclass.org/R2/writings/extprot-extensible-protocols-intro