Protojson: JSON serialization for Protocol Buffers

Google’s Protocol Buffers serializes to and deserializes from a compact binary format. As of this writing, there’s an open ticket for JSON serialization support. JSON is very useful when transporting data to web applications, or if you want human-readable bytes on the wire.

I recently wrote Protojson, a protobuf Message<->lists encoder/decoder in Python. You can get it at github.

Protojson requires the google.protobuf Python module, because it works with google.protobuf.message.Messages. Right now, Protojson only supports the PbLite (PbJsLite) format. You can use Protojson to send and receive Messages from web applications with Closure Library’s goog.proto2, or even use it for non-webapp purposes. If you’re interested in goog.proto2, see this thread, which links to a .proto->.pb.js compiler.

I haven’t benchmarked Protojson, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Protojson+simplejson was faster than the binary serialization (at least for Python).

Try it out and let me know how it works.