pbnj

pbnj

JavaScript protocol buffer schema parser and template based code generator

This project is functional and being used in real projects. But is in its early days and likely to be in a state of flux for some time.

Protocol Buffers

Protocol buffers were designed as a way to automatically serialize and deserialize data, in a fast and efficient manner. You define how you want your data to be structured in the special proto format, and then use special generated code to read and write your data.

This project focuses on using the proto schema definition as a generalized basis for code generation. Serialization / deserialization is a side effect of the generated code and this project is un-opinionated on such matters -- you may use JSON, binary data, JS Arrays, Message Pack, whatever.

To learn more about the proto buffer format, visit Google's Language Guide.

Rationale

• The official protoc compiler does have plugin support for customizing code generation, but the tool chain I was working with was nodejs and I wanted consistency. Also, exposing an object representation of the schema allows for other tools and analysis, for example schema validation and tests.

• I was unhappy with existing JS implementations. They seem to either be partially open sourced or else rely on unstructured JSON as their format in JS.

Author

Dan Pupius (personal website).

License

Copyright 2013 Daniel Pupius. Apache License, Version 2.0.