protocol-buffers

Protocol Buffers for Node.js

npm install protocol-buffers

Usage

Assuming the following test.proto file exists

enum FOO {
    BAR = 1;
}

message Test {
  required float num  = 1;
  required string payload = 2;
}

message AnotherOne {
    repeated FOO list = 1;
}

To use the above proto file to encode/decode messages do

var protobuf = require('protocol-buffers')

// pass a proto file as a buffer/string or pass a parsed protobuf-schema object
var messages = protobuf(fs.readFileSync('test.proto'))

var buf = messages.Test.encode({
    num: 42,
    payload: 'hello world'
});

console.log(buf); // should print a buffer

To decode a message use Test.decode

var obj = messages.Test.decode(buf);
console.log(obj); // should print an object similar to above

Enums are accessed in the same way as messages

var buf = messages.AnotherOne.encode({
    list: [
        messages.FOO.BAR
    ]
})

You can also use protocol-buffers/require to require .proto files from disk instead of passing them as buffers

var protobuf = require('protocol-buffers/require')
var messages = protobuf('test.proto') // will load and parse __dirname/test.proto

See the Google Protocol Buffers docs for more information about the available types etc.

Performance

This module is fast.

It uses code generation to build as fast as possible encoder/decoder for the protobuf schema You can run the benchmarks yourself by doing npm run bench.

On my Macbook Air it gives the following results

Benchmarking JSON (baseline)
  Running object encoding benchmark...
  Encoded 1000000 objects in 2213 ms (451875 enc/s)

  Running object decoding benchmark...
  Decoded 1000000 objects in 988 ms (1012146 dec/s)

  Running object encoding+decoding benchmark...
  Encoded+decoded 1000000 objects in 3434 ms (291206 enc+dec/s)

Benchmarking protocol-buffers
  Running object encoding benchmark...
  Encoded 1000000 objects in 2113 ms (473261 enc/s)

  Running object decoding benchmark...
  Decoded 1000000 objects in 886 ms (1128668 dec/s)

  Running object encoding+decoding benchmark...
  Encoded+decoded 1000000 objects in 2994 ms (334001 enc+dec/s)

Note that JSON parsing/serialization in node is native function that is really fast.

License

MIT