JsonSubTypes VS Protobuf.NET

If messages are arriving as Json you can use JsonSubTypes to deserialize to different DTOs based on the UUIDs (https://github.com/manuc66/JsonSubTypes) and then use the visitor pattern to dispatch the DTOs to the correct method.

Personally I've had good success with JsonSubTypes for deserializing discriminated unions from JSON. It'll serialize stuff into the right type, and then you just need a switch statement to typecast it afterwards.

There is a small use case that I consider valid for this. It would be for determining a set of pre-defined behaviors to make available to definitions of entities in a game. And the json data would not be coming from external sources, it would be tightly controlled by me as the developer. The response you made to the other comment on my post shared a link that said the practice shouldn't be done with untrusted data, and there would be no untrusted data since there'd be no external data. The article also mentions to restrict the types that can be deserialized, and that is definitely possible. The architecture pattern for this is ECS (Entity Component System) and the data-drive portion might have been a mis-naming of my post, it's more of a lot of the design of entities and components is stored in data files, and there are a few cases where I will want to associate certain functionality in the code with these data entity definitions. No operating system level functionality would be exposed. I've even been referred to a library available via nuget that will allow for what I'm attempting to do: https://github.com/manuc66/JsonSubTypes

This article requires that reader is familar with core concept of Akka.NET serialization (see https://getakka.net/articles/serialization/serialization.html) and ProtoBuf-Net library (see https://github.com/protobuf-net/protobuf-net).

The model used, a simple invoice which uses protobuf-net 1 NuGet package to store information in a binary file.

Not sure if it works with gRPC but I really like how Protobuf.NET uses attributes like other serializers instead of needing to write a .proto and generate (not-very-C#-friendly) classes from it. Well, until you need to interop with other languages.

I mentioned JSON, but there are many formats that are much more efficient. I can mention FlatBuffers, MessagePack and ProtoBuf. These are the ones I've used myself, and personally I'm most comfortable with MessagePack and ProtoBuf. I don't think the performance would be an issue if you had to choose between these three, it's mostly the API that is different.

The closest way would be using Grpc.Web + Protobuf.net. The overall experience is pretty close to WCF server + Client where you share a common interface and let the client and server just call through those.

Grpc Web with Blazor WASM is a really pleasant experience so far imo for my personal projects at home. You have strongly typed models and methods and you have choice on sharing the contract between client and server if you're using code first instead of proto IDL files (e.g. protobuf-net).

It's pretty straight-forward to follow the protobuf-net docs to serialize the report, but we should really GZIP the stream for sending to reduce bandwidth consumption and improve performance:

There are a number of Protobuf implementations for .NET Core, but I like protobuf-net as it's a nice, clean, Apache 2.0 Licensed implementation. It is also supported by protogen, a great online generator that will output protobuf-net classes ready for use (for its CSharp profile). If you open the latest schema from the link here, you can simply paste into the generator. NOTE: At the time of writing, [(js_preEncoded)=true] isn't supported by the generator, and can be removed from the proto schema.

> Protobuf-java is a little heavy [...] Just depending on the library adds 1.6MB and nearly 700 classes before you even generate your own message classes.

By comparison, protobuf-net [1] is about 260KB and 68 classes. Python's [2] is a 1MB package download (with source).

Why's the Java one so big?

[1] https://github.com/protobuf-net/protobuf-net

[2] https://pypi.org/project/protobuf