Is there a standard mapping between JSON and Protocol Buffers?
- by Daniel Earwicker
From a comment on the announcement blog post:
Regarding JSON: JSON is structured
similarly to Protocol Buffers, but
protocol buffer binary format is still
smaller and faster to encode. JSON
makes a great text encoding for
protocol buffers, though -- it's
trivial to write an encoder/decoder
that converts arbitrary protocol
messages to and from JSON, using
protobuf reflection. This is a good
way to communicate with AJAX apps,
since making the user download a full
protobuf decoder when they visit your
page might be too much.
It may be trivial to cook up a mapping, but is there a single "obvious" mapping between the two that any two separate dev teams would naturally settle on? If two products supported PB data and could interoperate because they shared the same .proto spec, I wonder if they would still be able to interoperate if they independently introduced a JSON reflection of the same spec. There might be some arbitrary decisions to be made, e.g. should enum values be represented by a string (to be human-readable a la typical JSON) or by their integer value?
So is there an established mapping, and any open source implementations for generating JSON encoder/decoders from .proto specs?
