[Rprotobuf-yada] RprotoBuf initiation

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 10 February 2010 at 10:31, Etienne Bellemare Racine wrote:
| 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.

Precisely. In a portable, efficient, fast and extensible matter.

| 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.

Right. You'd use native Java code to read, write, alter, ... the addressbook
encoded in a binary file and describe in a '.proto' ProtoBuf definiton. Now
thanks to RProtoBuf you can read, write, alter, ... the same addressbook with
having to pass data back and for to Java -- you simple read, write, ... the
protobuf file.

Plus, and while Google does not provide a network layer, you can do the same
thing 'over the wire' instead of with files, or store it in a database and
have clients in R, Java, Python, C++, ... all access the (binary) data as
they all can deparse the ProtoBuf representation. 

Makes sense now?

Amicalement,  Dirk

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