[Rprotobuf-yada] RprotoBuf initiation

[Etienne Bellemare Racine]

Dirk Eddelbuettel :
> On 9 February 2010 at 22:22, Romain Francois wrote:
> | (I had to manually let this email through, please consider register to 
> | this mailing list --- which is very low traffic --- if you will send 
> | more emails)
>
> Seconded. 
>   
Sorry for that, I had registered with one email and sent from an other 
one. It should be ok now.

I've gone to some of the vignettes and Google's documentation and I 
understand (I'm sorry if this is obvious I just want to be sure I 
understand right) that with proto buffer, you don't introduce a new way 
of creating structures in R, you provide a way to share a common 
structure with other languages.
So you can, to take the address book example, get stats in R from an 
address book which would be managed by some Java code, without passing 
by Java to let R access the data or vice versa.

Etienne
>  
> | protocol buffers are dumb data containers, as such they don't have logic 
> | (methods, etc ...), so you can't build an object oriented system on them.
> | 
> | As far as I am concerned, protobuf are just a way to structure data and 
> | transfer it to various languages. So for example if you serialize a 
> | message in R (with RProtoBuf) and deserialize it in java, you get the 
> | same data.
> | 
> | Does that help ?
> | 
> | Romain
> | 
> | On 02/09/2010 09:45 PM, Etienne Bellemare Racine wrote:
> | > Hi list,
> | >
> | > Following the annouce of the release of RprotoBuf I read on romain's
> | > blog
> | > <http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr/index.php?post/2010/02/04/RProtoBuf%3A-protocol-buffers-meet-R>,
> | > To his suggestion, I repost my comment here for an open discussion.
> | >
> | > RprotoBuf seems promizing, but could you provide a scenario comparing
> | > the traditional R approach and the proto buffer approach ? Are you
> | > suggesting the use the proto buffer instead of S4 class definition ? It
> | > appear like a way to access and store larger data structures by not
> | > loading it in memory, am I wrong ?
>
> I fear you may have misunderstood. Besides what Romain already said, note
> that Protocol Buffers are
>
>     a) language agnostic: Google itself supports C++, Java and Pythons; other
>        have built support for more languages -- so there is nothing in
>        Protocol Buffers that knows what R is, let alone S3 or S4
>
>     b) an efficient way to encode data in an extensible way, so it really
>        is a meta data and file format -- like XML or hdf5 or ...
>
> Hope this helps. 
>
> Dirk
>
> | >
> | > Thanks,
> | > Etienne
> | 
> | -- 
> | Romain Francois
> | Professional R Enthusiast
> | +33(0) 6 28 91 30 30
> | http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr
> | |- http://tr.im/NrTG : Rcpp 0.7.5
> | |- http://tr.im/MPYc : RProtoBuf: protocol buffers for R
> | `- http://tr.im/KfKn : Rcpp 0.7.2
> | 
> | 
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