Protocol Buffers (protobuf)¶

protobuf is a PECL extension implementing Protocol Buffers, Google’s language-neutral, binary serialization format. Messages are defined once in a .proto schema file, then compiled by the protoc compiler into PHP classes, generated getters, setters, and serialization code, that the extension accelerates at runtime.

Protobuf-encoded messages are smaller and faster to encode and decode than JSON or XML, because the format is binary and schema-driven: field names are not repeated in every message, only compact field tags are. This makes it a natural fit for high-throughput RPC, most notably as the wire format used by gRPC, and for systems that need forward- and backward-compatible schema evolution, since fields can be added or deprecated without breaking older readers.

The extension provides a native C implementation of the generated message classes; without it, the pure-PHP runtime from the google/protobuf Composer package is used instead, which works but is considerably slower for large messages.

<?php

    // person.proto defines:
    //   message Person { string name = 1; int32 id = 2; }
    // compiled with: protoc --php_out=. person.proto

    $person = new Person();
    $person->setName('Ada');
    $person->setId(1);

    $binary = $person->serializeToString();

    $decoded = new Person();
    $decoded->mergeFromString($binary);
    echo $decoded->getName();

?>

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Protocol Buffers (protobuf)¶

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