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 66K GitHub stars and 15.5K 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... ...

  • JavaScript
    JavaScript

    JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles. ...

  • Python
    Python

    Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best. ...

Protobuf alternatives & related posts

JSON logo

JSON

1.9K
9
A lightweight data-interchange format
1.9K
9
PROS OF JSON
  • 5
    Simple
  • 4
    Widely supported
CONS OF JSON
    Be the first to leave a con

    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).

    See more

    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)

    See more
    Apache Thrift logo

    Apache Thrift

    177
    0
    Software framework for scalable cross-language services development
    177
    0
    PROS OF APACHE THRIFT
      Be the first to leave a pro
      CONS OF APACHE THRIFT
        Be the first to leave a con

        related Apache Thrift posts

        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
        See more
        ActiveMQ logo

        ActiveMQ

        611
        77
        A message broker written in Java together with a full JMS client
        611
        77
        PROS OF ACTIVEMQ
        • 18
          Easy to use
        • 14
          Open source
        • 13
          Efficient
        • 10
          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.

        See more
        Naushad Warsi
        software developer at klingelnberg · | 1 upvote · 787.3K 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.

        See more
        Avro logo

        Avro

        271
        0
        A data serialization framework
        271
        0
        PROS OF AVRO
          Be the first to leave a pro
          CONS OF AVRO
            Be the first to leave a con

            related Avro posts

            MQTT logo

            MQTT

            615
            7
            A machine-to-machine Internet of Things connectivity protocol
            615
            7
            PROS OF MQTT
            • 3
              Varying levels of Quality of Service to fit a range of
            • 2
              Lightweight with a relatively small data footprint
            • 2
              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.

            See more
            Shared insights
            on
            MQTTMQTTReductStoreReductStore

            You can use ReductStore to keep a history of MQTT messages by using its Client SDKs. This can be useful if you use a binary format for your data and it can be recorded in a classical TSDB. You can set a FIFO quota for a bucket in your ReductStore instance so that the database removes old MQTT messages when the limit is reached.

            See more
            gRPC logo

            gRPC

            2.2K
            63
            A high performance, open-source universal RPC framework
            2.2K
            63
            PROS OF GRPC
            • 24
              Higth performance
            • 15
              The future of API
            • 13
              Easy setup
            • 5
              Contract-based
            • 4
              Polyglot
            • 2
              Garbage
            CONS OF GRPC
              Be the first to leave a con

              related gRPC posts

              Noah Zoschke
              Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 496.4K views

              We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. Behind the scenes the Config API is built with Go , GRPC and Envoy.

              At Segment, we build new services in Go by default. The language is simple so new team members quickly ramp up on a codebase. The tool chain is fast so developers get immediate feedback when they break code, tests or integrations with other systems. The runtime is fast so it performs great at scale.

              For the newest round of APIs we adopted the GRPC service #framework.

              The Protocol Buffer service definition language makes it easy to design type-safe and consistent APIs, thanks to ecosystem tools like the Google API Design Guide for API standards, uber/prototool for formatting and linting .protos and lyft/protoc-gen-validate for defining field validations, and grpc-gateway for defining REST mapping.

              With a well designed .proto, its easy to generate a Go server interface and a TypeScript client, providing type-safe RPC between languages.

              For the API gateway and RPC we adopted the Envoy service proxy.

              The internet-facing segmentapis.com endpoint is an Envoy front proxy that rate-limits and authenticates every request. It then transcodes a #REST / #JSON request to an upstream GRPC request. The upstream GRPC servers are running an Envoy sidecar configured for Datadog stats.

              The result is API #security , #reliability and consistent #observability through Envoy configuration, not code.

              We experimented with Swagger service definitions, but the spec is sprawling and the generated clients and server stubs leave a lot to be desired. GRPC and .proto and the Go implementation feels better designed and implemented. Thanks to the GRPC tooling and ecosystem you can generate Swagger from .protos, but it’s effectively impossible to go the other way.

              See more
              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.

              See more
              JavaScript logo

              JavaScript

              361.2K
              8.1K
              Lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions
              361.2K
              8.1K
              PROS OF JAVASCRIPT
              • 1.7K
                Can be used on frontend/backend
              • 1.5K
                It's everywhere
              • 1.2K
                Lots of great frameworks
              • 898
                Fast
              • 746
                Light weight
              • 425
                Flexible
              • 392
                You can't get a device today that doesn't run js
              • 286
                Non-blocking i/o
              • 237
                Ubiquitousness
              • 191
                Expressive
              • 55
                Extended functionality to web pages
              • 49
                Relatively easy language
              • 46
                Executed on the client side
              • 30
                Relatively fast to the end user
              • 25
                Pure Javascript
              • 21
                Functional programming
              • 15
                Async
              • 13
                Full-stack
              • 12
                Future Language of The Web
              • 12
                Setup is easy
              • 12
                Its everywhere
              • 11
                Because I love functions
              • 11
                JavaScript is the New PHP
              • 10
                Like it or not, JS is part of the web standard
              • 9
                Easy
              • 9
                Can be used in backend, frontend and DB
              • 9
                Expansive community
              • 9
                Everyone use it
              • 8
                Easy to hire developers
              • 8
                Most Popular Language in the World
              • 8
                For the good parts
              • 8
                Can be used both as frontend and backend as well
              • 8
                No need to use PHP
              • 8
                Powerful
              • 7
                Evolution of C
              • 7
                Its fun and fast
              • 7
                It's fun
              • 7
                Nice
              • 7
                Versitile
              • 7
                Hard not to use
              • 7
                Popularized Class-Less Architecture & Lambdas
              • 7
                Agile, packages simple to use
              • 7
                Supports lambdas and closures
              • 7
                Love-hate relationship
              • 7
                Photoshop has 3 JS runtimes built in
              • 6
                1.6K Can be used on frontend/backend
              • 6
                Client side JS uses the visitors CPU to save Server Res
              • 6
                It let's me use Babel & Typescript
              • 6
                Easy to make something
              • 6
                Can be used on frontend/backend/Mobile/create PRO Ui
              • 5
                Client processing
              • 5
                What to add
              • 5
                Everywhere
              • 5
                Scope manipulation
              • 5
                Function expressions are useful for callbacks
              • 5
                Stockholm Syndrome
              • 5
                Promise relationship
              • 5
                Clojurescript
              • 4
                Only Programming language on browser
              • 4
                Because it is so simple and lightweight
              • 1
                Easy to learn and test
              • 1
                Easy to understand
              • 1
                Not the best
              • 1
                Subskill #4
              • 1
                Hard to learn
              • 1
                Test2
              • 1
                Test
              • 1
                Easy to learn
              • 0
                Hard 彤
              CONS OF JAVASCRIPT
              • 22
                A constant moving target, too much churn
              • 20
                Horribly inconsistent
              • 15
                Javascript is the New PHP
              • 9
                No ability to monitor memory utilitization
              • 8
                Shows Zero output in case of ANY error
              • 7
                Thinks strange results are better than errors
              • 6
                Can be ugly
              • 3
                No GitHub
              • 2
                Slow
              • 0
                HORRIBLE DOCUMENTS, faulty code, repo has bugs

              related JavaScript posts

              Zach Holman

              Oof. I have truly hated JavaScript for a long time. Like, for over twenty years now. Like, since the Clinton administration. It's always been a nightmare to deal with all of the aspects of that silly language.

              But wowza, things have changed. Tooling is just way, way better. I'm primarily web-oriented, and using React and Apollo together the past few years really opened my eyes to building rich apps. And I deeply apologize for using the phrase rich apps; I don't think I've ever said such Enterprisey words before.

              But yeah, things are different now. I still love Rails, and still use it for a lot of apps I build. But it's that silly rich apps phrase that's the problem. Users have way more comprehensive expectations than they did even five years ago, and the JS community does a good job at building tools and tech that tackle the problems of making heavy, complicated UI and frontend work.

              Obviously there's a lot of things happening here, so just saying "JavaScript isn't terrible" might encompass a huge amount of libraries and frameworks. But if you're like me, yeah, give things another shot- I'm somehow not hating on JavaScript anymore and... gulp... I kinda love it.

              See more
              Conor Myhrvold
              Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 12.7M views

              How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:

              Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.

              Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:

              https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

              (GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

              Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

              See more
              Python logo

              Python

              245K
              6.9K
              A clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.
              245K
              6.9K
              PROS OF PYTHON
              • 1.2K
                Great libraries
              • 963
                Readable code
              • 847
                Beautiful code
              • 788
                Rapid development
              • 691
                Large community
              • 438
                Open source
              • 393
                Elegant
              • 282
                Great community
              • 273
                Object oriented
              • 221
                Dynamic typing
              • 77
                Great standard library
              • 60
                Very fast
              • 55
                Functional programming
              • 50
                Easy to learn
              • 46
                Scientific computing
              • 35
                Great documentation
              • 29
                Productivity
              • 28
                Matlab alternative
              • 28
                Easy to read
              • 24
                Simple is better than complex
              • 20
                It's the way I think
              • 19
                Imperative
              • 18
                Very programmer and non-programmer friendly
              • 18
                Free
              • 17
                Machine learning support
              • 17
                Powerfull language
              • 16
                Fast and simple
              • 14
                Scripting
              • 12
                Explicit is better than implicit
              • 11
                Ease of development
              • 10
                Clear and easy and powerfull
              • 9
                Unlimited power
              • 8
                Import antigravity
              • 8
                It's lean and fun to code
              • 7
                Print "life is short, use python"
              • 7
                Python has great libraries for data processing
              • 6
                High Documented language
              • 6
                I love snakes
              • 6
                Readability counts
              • 6
                Rapid Prototyping
              • 6
                Now is better than never
              • 6
                Although practicality beats purity
              • 6
                Flat is better than nested
              • 6
                Great for tooling
              • 6
                There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious
              • 6
                Fast coding and good for competitions
              • 5
                Web scraping
              • 5
                Lists, tuples, dictionaries
              • 5
                Great for analytics
              • 4
                Beautiful is better than ugly
              • 4
                Easy to learn and use
              • 4
                Easy to setup and run smooth
              • 4
                Multiple Inheritence
              • 4
                CG industry needs
              • 4
                Socially engaged community
              • 4
                Complex is better than complicated
              • 4
                Plotting
              • 4
                Simple and easy to learn
              • 3
                List comprehensions
              • 3
                Powerful language for AI
              • 3
                Flexible and easy
              • 3
                It is Very easy , simple and will you be love programmi
              • 3
                Many types of collections
              • 3
                If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a g
              • 3
                If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad id
              • 3
                Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules
              • 3
                Pip install everything
              • 3
                No cruft
              • 3
                Generators
              • 3
                Import this
              • 2
                Batteries included
              • 2
                Securit
              • 2
                Can understand easily who are new to programming
              • 2
                Should START with this but not STICK with This
              • 2
                A-to-Z
              • 2
                Because of Netflix
              • 2
                Only one way to do it
              • 2
                Better outcome
              • 2
                Good for hacking
              • 1
                Best friend for NLP
              • 1
                Sexy af
              • 1
                Procedural programming
              • 1
                Automation friendly
              • 1
                Slow
              • 0
                Keep it simple
              • 0
                Powerful
              • 0
                Ni
              CONS OF PYTHON
              • 53
                Still divided between python 2 and python 3
              • 28
                Performance impact
              • 26
                Poor syntax for anonymous functions
              • 22
                GIL
              • 19
                Package management is a mess
              • 14
                Too imperative-oriented
              • 12
                Hard to understand
              • 12
                Dynamic typing
              • 12
                Very slow
              • 8
                Indentations matter a lot
              • 8
                Not everything is expression
              • 7
                Incredibly slow
              • 7
                Explicit self parameter in methods
              • 6
                Requires C functions for dynamic modules
              • 6
                Poor DSL capabilities
              • 6
                No anonymous functions
              • 5
                Fake object-oriented programming
              • 5
                Threading
              • 5
                The "lisp style" whitespaces
              • 5
                Official documentation is unclear.
              • 5
                Hard to obfuscate
              • 5
                Circular import
              • 4
                Lack of Syntax Sugar leads to "the pyramid of doom"
              • 4
                The benevolent-dictator-for-life quit
              • 4
                Not suitable for autocomplete
              • 2
                Meta classes
              • 1
                Training wheels (forced indentation)

              related Python posts

              Conor Myhrvold
              Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 44 upvotes · 12.7M views

              How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:

              Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.

              Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:

              https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

              (GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

              Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

              See more
              Nick Parsons
              Building cool things on the internet 🛠️ at Stream · | 35 upvotes · 4.3M views

              Winds 2.0 is an open source Podcast/RSS reader developed by Stream with a core goal to enable a wide range of developers to contribute.

              We chose JavaScript because nearly every developer knows or can, at the very least, read JavaScript. With ES6 and Node.js v10.x.x, it’s become a very capable language. Async/Await is powerful and easy to use (Async/Await vs Promises). Babel allows us to experiment with next-generation JavaScript (features that are not in the official JavaScript spec yet). Yarn allows us to consistently install packages quickly (and is filled with tons of new tricks)

              We’re using JavaScript for everything – both front and backend. Most of our team is experienced with Go and Python, so Node was not an obvious choice for this app.

              Sure... there will be haters who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything remotely positive about JavaScript (there are even rants on Hacker News about Node.js); however, without writing completely in JavaScript, we would not have seen the results we did.

              #FrameworksFullStack #Languages

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