[sldev] Google data exchange format

Matthew Dowd matthew.dowd at hotmail.co.uk
Fri Jul 11 09:09:39 PDT 2008


Maybe I'm missing something but as far as I can tell Google has

a) (re)invented yet another data description language of which there are already plentiful (e.g. XML Schema and ASN.1 to name but two)
b) (re)invented yet another data serialisation of which there are already plentiful (e.g. XML and BER to name but two).

I've separated these out as how you describe data structures and how you serialise are independent (and you can mixed and match) - to illustrate this if I want to serialise a data structure described in XML Schema using the google data exchange format, all I need to do is write something (say in perl) to convert XML Schemas to googles data description language.

Likewise a perl script to convert google data language to XML schema would easbily allow serialising google described data in XML.

Typically the serilialisation used for interoperable data exchange isn't the same serialisation as used internally by software/system. This is because the exchange format is optimised for description, readability, adaptability (as the interchange format may contain data not used by all the systems it is designed to interchange with), whereas the internal serialisations are optimised for performance - often it isn't possible to optimise for both used simultaneously.

Matthew

> Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:23:31 +0300
> From: tao.takashi at googlemail.com
> To: lenglish5 at cox.net
> Subject: Re: [sldev] Google data exchange format
> CC: sldev at lists.secondlife.com; rdw at lindenlab.com
>
> Just FYI: Kenton Varda of Google released the Python version now as a
> Python Egg:
>
> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/protobuf
>
> Besides that I also created an IRC channel on freenode (#protobuf) and
> the Google Group seems to be quite active so I would suppose that it
> will gain quite some traction. All in all it's also a good example of
> how open sourcing an internal project can work.

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