protons

protons

Protocol Buffers for Node.js and the browser without compilation and eval.

Forked from protocol-buffers to remove usage of eval.

> npm install protons

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;
}

Use the above proto file to encode/decode messages by doing

const protons = require('protons')

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

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

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

To decode a message use Test.decode

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

Enums are accessed in the same way as messages

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

Nested emums are accessed as properties on the corresponding message

const buf = message.SomeMessage.encode({
  list: [
    messages.SomeMessage.NESTED_ENUM.VALUE
  ]
})

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

Performance

This module is pretty fast.

You can run the benchmarks yourself by doing npm run bench.

On my Macbook Pro it gives the following results

JSON (encode) x 516,087 ops/sec ±6.68% (73 runs sampled)
JSON (decode) x 534,339 ops/sec ±1.79% (89 runs sampled)
JSON(encode + decode) x 236,625 ops/sec ±5.42% (81 runs sampled)
protocol-buffers (encode) x 385,121 ops/sec ±3.89% (82 runs sampled)
protocol-buffers (decode) x 945,545 ops/sec ±2.39% (86 runs sampled)
protocol-buffers(encode + decode) x 279,605 ops/sec ±2.83% (86 runs sampled)
npm (encode) x 377,625 ops/sec ±3.15% (84 runs sampled)
npm (decode) x 948,428 ops/sec ±3.59% (87 runs sampled)
npm(encode + decode) x 251,929 ops/sec ±2.91% (81 runs sampled)
local (encode) x 373,376 ops/sec ±6.90% (66 runs sampled)
local (decode) x 1,770,870 ops/sec ±1.50% (83 runs sampled)
local(encode + decode) x 322,507 ops/sec ±2.82% (79 runs sampled)

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

Leveldb encoding compatibility

Compiled protocol buffers messages are valid levelup encodings. This means you can pass them as valueEncoding and keyEncoding.

const level = require('level')
const db = level('db')

db.put('hello', {payload:'world'}, {valueEncoding:messages.Test}, (err) => {
  db.get('hello', {valueEncoding:messages.Test}, (err, message) => {
    console.log(message)
  })
})

License

MIT