7

Do you know of a robust, free, ideally open source, web service that uses protobuf.

I maintain an Android library for networking and I write samples for every module. For instance, the JSON modules use Github apis to get some data from the network and illustrate the client library usage.

Do you know an equivalent for protobuf ?

Thanks in advance.

Snicolas
  • 37,840
  • 15
  • 114
  • 173
  • I hope you find examples; but the challenge is that protobuf is typically used for internal communications and is not a particularly good choice for external public APIs. So you'd have better chance if you could see web services companies only use internally. – StaxMan Jul 24 '13 at 18:58
  • I agree, but It could be worth it for the mobile as well and I am pretty sure it is already used by lots of companies, not only internally but to keep their mobile services lighter. – Snicolas Jul 24 '13 at 19:08
  • I disagree that it makes sense -- too fragile for evolving external services -- but I agree in that it'd be good to have something to test against. So I hope you get some answers (I could find it useful for some testing of my own). FWIW, there are alternatives for protobuf that are less fragile: `Smile` (binary JSON), `msgpack` – StaxMan Jul 24 '13 at 20:06
  • Is there any Java implementation for Smile or msgpack ? Anything that works on Android ? @StaxMan, is there any open webservice using smile ? – Snicolas Jul 25 '13 at 05:43
  • For Smile there is Jackson module at https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-dataformat-smile. Jackson works well on Android. I know that `ElasticSearch` allows use of Smile as alternative to JSON; but I don't know if there are public installations. – StaxMan Jul 25 '13 at 20:51
  • There is also Java implemention of MsgPack library (from http://msgpack.org/), and I assume it works on Android. – StaxMan Jul 25 '13 at 20:52
  • See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15446179/are-there-any-applications-currently-offering-a-protocol-buffers-api – Emil Sit Jul 30 '13 at 17:30

1 Answers1

1

Your protobuf module could use this api to access from the android market place:

https://code.google.com/p/android-market-api/

RealDeal_EE'18
  • 326
  • 1
  • 9
  • This looks interesting. I contacted the author to see if the library is still working. If it is, you will get the bounty. Thx ! – Snicolas Jul 31 '13 at 17:00