Google protocol buffers and stl vectors, maps and boost shared pointers

Question

Does google protocol buffers support stl vectors, maps and boost shared pointers? I have some objects that make heavy use of stl containers like maps, vectors and also boost::shared_ptr. I want to use google protocol buffers to serialize these objects across the network to different machines.

I want to know does google protobuf support these containers? Also if I use apache thrift instead, will it be better? I only need to serialize/de-serialize data and don't need the network transport that apache thrift offers. Also apache thrift not having proper documentation puts me off.

Answer 1

Protocol buffers directly handles an intentionally small number of constructs; vectors map nicely to the "repeated" element type, but how this is presented in C++ is via "add" methods - you don't (AFAIK) just hand it a vector. See "Repeated Embedded Message Fields" here for more info.

Re maps; there is no inbuilt mechanism for that, but a key/value pair is easily represented in .proto (typically key = 1, value = 2) and then handled via "repeated".

A shared_ptr itself would seem to have little meaning in a serialized file. But the object may be handled (presumably) as a message.

Note that in the google C++ version the DTO layer is generated, so you may need to map between them and any existing object model. This is usually pretty trivial.

For some languages/platforms there are protobuf variants that work against existing object models.

(sorry, I can't comment on thrift - I'm not familiar with it)