[Rprotobuf-yada] RprotoBuf initiation

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 10 February 2010 at 19:43, Romain Francois wrote:
| On 02/10/2010 04:53 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| >
| >
| > 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.
| 
| Yep. But this part of the R package does not quite work yet.
| 
| But it will at some point be possible to have say an "protobuf message 
| server" embedded in the R session and a protobuf message client in 
| another session, or in java or in whatever other language ...

Right. Or go the other way and store the Protobuf binary bits as 'values' in
a key/value database. I have a looked at a few of these new NoSQL databases.
But that would be yet-another-project and maybe no a good idea :)
 
| If all goes as planned, something like this should be demonstrable at 
| useR! this year.

Yep!

Dirk

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