Google Protocol Buffers: JavaScript Example

Question

Is it a good choice to use Google Protocol Buffers in JavaScript or is it better to do it with JSON?

Also it'd be great if someone can give me a simple example about Protocol Buffers implementation in JavaScript. The documentation on the Google's site is scarce.

Answer 1

[edit] Google's open source implementation of protocol buffers is available on GitHub

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The official protobuf project support only Java, C++, and Python. Not JavaScript.

According to the Wiki of the project, there are three projects porting protocol buffers to JavaScript.

• Protobuf.js: https://github.com/dcodeIO/ProtoBuf.js
• protobuf-js: http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-js/
• protojs: http://github.com/sirikata/protojs

Protobuf.js is up to date. protobuf-js has not been updated for two years, so I would favor Protobuf.js.

The question still is "Why?": protobuf may be a bit smaller, especially when a lot of numeric values are transferred, but JSON is simply the more common protocol in the JS space and probably better supported and easier to integrate into other tools.