Alternatives to Protobuf logo

Alternatives to Protobuf

JSON, Apache Thrift, ActiveMQ, Avro, and MQTT are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Protobuf.
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What is Protobuf and what are its top alternatives?

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler.
Protobuf is a tool in the Serialization Frameworks category of a tech stack.
Protobuf is an open source tool with 63.1K GitHub stars and 15.2K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Protobuf's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Protobuf

  • JSON
    JSON

    JavaScript Object Notation is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language. ...

  • Apache Thrift
    Apache Thrift

    The Apache Thrift software framework, for scalable cross-language services development, combines a software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, JavaScript, Node.js, Smalltalk, OCaml and Delphi and other languages. ...

  • ActiveMQ
    ActiveMQ

    Apache ActiveMQ is fast, supports many Cross Language Clients and Protocols, comes with easy to use Enterprise Integration Patterns and many advanced features while fully supporting JMS 1.1 and J2EE 1.4. Apache ActiveMQ is released under the Apache 2.0 License. ...

  • Avro
    Avro

    It is a row-oriented remote procedure call and data serialization framework developed within Apache's Hadoop project. It uses JSON for defining data types and protocols, and serializes data in a compact binary format. ...

  • MQTT
    MQTT

    It was designed as an extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport. It is useful for connections with remote locations where a small code footprint is required and/or network bandwidth is at a premium. ...

  • gRPC
    gRPC

    gRPC is a modern open source high performance RPC framework that can run in any environment. It can efficiently connect services in and across data centers with pluggable support for load balancing, tracing, health checking... ...

  • Serde
    Serde

    It is a framework for serializing and deserializing Rust data structures efficiently and generically. The ecosystem consists of data structures that know how to serialize and deserialize themselves along with data formats that know how to serialize and deserialize other things. It provides the layer by which these two groups interact with each other, allowing any supported data structure to be serialized and deserialized using any supported data format. ...

  • MessagePack
    MessagePack

    It is an efficient binary serialization format. It lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON. But it's faster and smaller. Small integers are encoded into a single byte, and typical short strings require only one extra byte in addition to the strings themselves. ...

Protobuf alternatives & related posts

JSON logo

JSON

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A lightweight data-interchange format
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PROS OF JSON
  • 5
    Simple
  • 4
    Widely supported
CONS OF JSON
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    related JSON posts

    Ali Soueidan
    Creative Web Developer at Ali Soueidan · | 18 upvotes · 1.2M views

    Application and Data: Since my personal website ( https://alisoueidan.com ) is a SPA I've chosen to use Vue.js, as a framework to create it. After a short skeptical phase I immediately felt in love with the single file component concept! I also used vuex for state management, which makes working with several components, which are communicating with each other even more fun and convenient to use. Of course, using Vue requires using JavaScript as well, since it is the basis of it.

    For markup and style, I used Pug and Sass, since they’re the perfect match to me. I love the clean and strict syntax of both of them and even more that their structure is almost similar. Also, both of them come with an expanded functionality such as mixins, loops and so on related to their “siblings” (HTML and CSS). Both of them require nesting and prevent untidy code, which can be a huge advantage when working in teams. I used JSON to store data (since the data quantity on my website is moderate) – JSON works also good in combo with Pug, using for loops, based on the JSON Objects for example.

    To send my contact form I used PHP, since sending emails using PHP is still relatively convenient, simple and easy done.

    DevOps: Of course, I used Git to do my version management (which I even do in smaller projects like my website just have an additional backup of my code). On top of that I used GitHub since it now supports private repository for free accounts (which I am using for my own). I use Babel to use ES6 functionality such as arrow functions and so on, and still don’t losing cross browser compatibility.

    Side note: I used npm for package management. 🎉

    *Business Tools: * I use Asana to organize my project. This is a big advantage to me, even if I work alone, since “private” projects can get interrupted for some time. By using Asana I still know (even after month of not touching a project) what I’ve done, on which task I was at last working on and what still is to do. Working in Teams (for enterprise I’d take on Jira instead) of course Asana is a Tool which I really love to use as well. All the graphics on my website are SVG which I have created with Adobe Illustrator and adjusted within the SVG code or by using JavaScript or CSS (SASS).

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    I use Visual Studio Code because at this time is a mature software and I can do practically everything using it.

    • It's free and open source: The project is hosted on GitHub and it’s free to download, fork, modify and contribute to the project.

    • Multi-platform: You can download binaries for different platforms, included Windows (x64), MacOS and Linux (.rpm and .deb packages)

    • LightWeight: It runs smoothly in different devices. It has an average memory and CPU usage. Starts almost immediately and it’s very stable.

    • Extended language support: Supports by default the majority of the most used languages and syntax like JavaScript, HTML, C#, Swift, Java, PHP, Python and others. Also, VS Code supports different file types associated to projects like .ini, .properties, XML and JSON files.

    • Integrated tools: Includes an integrated terminal, debugger, problem list and console output inspector. The project navigator sidebar is simple and powerful: you can manage your files and folders with ease. The command palette helps you find commands by text. The search widget has a powerful auto-complete feature to search and find your files.

    • Extensible and configurable: There are many extensions available for every language supported, including syntax highlighters, IntelliSense and code completion, and debuggers. There are also extension to manage application configuration and architecture like Docker and Jenkins.

    • Integrated with Git: You can visually manage your project repositories, pull, commit and push your changes, and easy conflict resolution.( there is support for SVN (Subversion) users by plugin)

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    Apache Thrift logo

    Apache Thrift

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    Software framework for scalable cross-language services development
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    PROS OF APACHE THRIFT
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      CONS OF APACHE THRIFT
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        Since the beginning, Cal Henderson has been the CTO of Slack. Earlier this year, he commented on a Quora question summarizing their current stack.

        Apps
        • Web: a mix of JavaScript/ES6 and React.
        • Desktop: And Electron to ship it as a desktop application.
        • Android: a mix of Java and Kotlin.
        • iOS: written in a mix of Objective C and Swift.
        Backend
        • The core application and the API written in PHP/Hack that runs on HHVM.
        • The data is stored in MySQL using Vitess.
        • Caching is done using Memcached and MCRouter.
        • The search service takes help from SolrCloud, with various Java services.
        • The messaging system uses WebSockets with many services in Java and Go.
        • Load balancing is done using HAproxy with Consul for configuration.
        • Most services talk to each other over gRPC,
        • Some Thrift and JSON-over-HTTP
        • Voice and video calling service was built in Elixir.
        Data warehouse
        • Built using open source tools including Presto, Spark, Airflow, Hadoop and Kafka.
        Etc
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        ActiveMQ logo

        ActiveMQ

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        A message broker written in Java together with a full JMS client
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        PROS OF ACTIVEMQ
        • 18
          Easy to use
        • 14
          Open source
        • 13
          Efficient
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          JMS compliant
        • 6
          High Availability
        • 5
          Scalable
        • 3
          Distributed Network of brokers
        • 3
          Persistence
        • 3
          Support XA (distributed transactions)
        • 1
          Docker delievery
        • 1
          Highly configurable
        • 0
          RabbitMQ
        CONS OF ACTIVEMQ
        • 1
          ONLY Vertically Scalable
        • 1
          Support
        • 1
          Low resilience to exceptions and interruptions
        • 1
          Difficult to scale

        related ActiveMQ posts

        I want to choose Message Queue with the following features - Highly Available, Distributed, Scalable, Monitoring. I have RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ, Kafka and Apache RocketMQ in mind. But I am confused which one to choose.

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        Naushad Warsi
        software developer at klingelnberg · | 1 upvote · 774.9K views
        Shared insights
        on
        ActiveMQActiveMQRabbitMQRabbitMQ

        I use ActiveMQ because RabbitMQ have stopped giving the support for AMQP 1.0 or above version and the earlier version of AMQP doesn't give the functionality to support OAuth.

        If OAuth is not required and we can go with AMQP 0.9 then i still recommend rabbitMq.

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        Avro logo

        Avro

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        A data serialization framework
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        PROS OF AVRO
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          CONS OF AVRO
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            MQTT logo

            MQTT

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            A machine-to-machine Internet of Things connectivity protocol
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            PROS OF MQTT
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              Varying levels of Quality of Service to fit a range of
            • 2
              Lightweight with a relatively small data footprint
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              Very easy to configure and use with open source tools
            CONS OF MQTT
            • 1
              Easy to configure in an unsecure manner

            related MQTT posts

            Kindly suggest the best tool for generating 10Mn+ concurrent user load. The tool must support MQTT traffic, REST API, support to interfaces such as Kafka, websockets, persistence HTTP connection, auth type support to assess the support /coverage.

            The tool can be integrated into CI pipelines like Azure Pipelines, GitHub, and Jenkins.

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            A Nielsen
            Fullstack Dev at ADTELA · | 2 upvotes · 209.3K views

            Hi Marc,

            For the com part, depending of more details not provided, i'd use SSE, OR i'd run either Mosquitto or RabbitMQ running on Amazon EC2 instances and leverage MQTT or amqp 's subscribe/publish features with my users running mqtt or amqp clients (tcp or websockets) somehow. (publisher too.. you don't say how and who gets to update the document(s).

            I find "a ton of end users", depending on how you define a ton (1k users ;) ?) and how frequent document updates are, that can mean a ton of ressources, can't cut it at some point, even using SSE

            how many, how big, how persistant do the document(s) have to be ? Db-wise,can't say for lack of details and context, yeah could also be Redis, any RDBMS or nosql or even static json files stored on an Amazon S3 bucket .. anything really

            Good luck!

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            gRPC logo

            gRPC

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            A high performance, open-source universal RPC framework
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            PROS OF GRPC
            • 24
              Higth performance
            • 15
              The future of API
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              Easy setup
            • 5
              Contract-based
            • 4
              Polyglot
            • 2
              Garbage
            CONS OF GRPC
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              related gRPC posts

              Dylan Krupp
              Shared insights
              on
              gRPCgRPCGraphQLGraphQL

              I used GraphQL extensively at a previous employer a few years ago and really appreciated the data-driven schema etc alongside the many other benefits it provided. At that time, it seemed like it was set to replace RESTful APIs and many companies were adopting it.

              However, as of late, it seems like interest has been waning for GraphQL as opposed to increasing as I had assumed it would. Am I missing something here? What is the current perspective regarding this technology?

              Currently, I'm working with gRPC and was curious as to the state of everything now.

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              Shared insights
              on
              gRPCgRPCSignalRSignalR.NET.NET

              We need to interact from several different Web applications (remote) to a client-side application (.exe in .NET Framework, Windows.Console under our controlled environment). From the web applications, we need to send and receive data and invoke methods to client-side .exe on javascript events like users onclick. SignalR is one of the .Net alternatives to do that, but it adds overhead for what we need. Is it better to add SignalR at both client-side application and remote web application, or use gRPC as it sounds lightest and is multilingual?

              SignalR or gRPC are always sending and receiving data on the client-side (from browser to .exe and back to browser). And web application is used for graphical visualization of data to the user. There is no need for local .exe to send or interact with remote web API. Which architecture or framework do you suggest to use in this case?

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              Serde logo

              Serde

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              Serialization framework for Rust
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              PROS OF SERDE
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                  MessagePack logo

                  MessagePack

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                  A binary serialization format
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                  PROS OF MESSAGEPACK
                  • 1
                    Lightweight
                  CONS OF MESSAGEPACK
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