deepstream.io VS Protobuf

Deepstream is an open-source library for real-time web application development. The library, which is built with Node.js and Engine.io, helps developers build frontend web applications that perform real-time updates while requiring minimal backend code.

I'm working on a few projects, from one/two days to platforms.

The first is OS and is a simple nodeJS environment to deploy applications via lambda and express quickly. Sort of like nestJS except less decorators and more functional (https://vramework.io/). I already know of a few other colleagues that rolled their own propriety versions of this to support enterprise and cloud deployments so decided to OS it.

The other OS project is a strongly typed postgres/mysql driver. The idea is to generate typescript definitions directly from postgres (https://github.com/vramework/schemats) and then have a think layer ontop of pg-node that gives you strongly typed queries (https://github.com/vramework/postgres-typed).

An open-source project I spent a few years on the core team is https://deepstream.io/, a realtime-server that allows you to mix and match multiple streaming protocols (mqtt/websocket/others) and allow those clients to talk to each other using pub-sub and records. I'm not longer working for it but wanted to give it a shout out!

On a non OS project, I have been working on an immersive audio platform for a while now. The main goal is to allow users to pick and choose how audio books progress, and also have a live session mode which allows users to record their pulse / answer questions and a few other metrics and associate it with sentences. I pretty much built and deployed all of it but require some advice/brainstorming on how to proceed now. I built it to satisfy an itch when I was practicing shamanism during the first lockdown when I was in-between contracts / taking time off.

I also want to build a simple web-pages strategy game based around eco-education, but don't have the bandwidth . If anyone is interested in mixing together gamification and eco-village building might be a fun conversion to bounce ideas!

All the OS projects above were used to support my personal/a couple professional projects over the last few years.

Email in profile

I'm currently looking for a contract that is part-time that is focused on consultancy or smaller projects (such as setting up containerized AWS environments)

I am looking for part-time contract or freelance/consulting opportunities at the moment (up to 20 hours/week).

GitHub: https://github.com/yasserf

OS projects I am/was core maintainer of: https://vramework.io/ and https://deepstream.io/

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/yasserfadl

Email: [email protected]

https://deepstream.io is the closest and has a richer feature set (including a replicating document store), however it seems to have a small ecosystem / community / limited support options, and permissions do not seem as advanced.

https://nats.io is close but lower level. Has a large community and rich ecosystem however.

Then you can also mix and match lowever level technologies to achieve the particular set of tradeoffs you need. MQTT, AMQP as the protocol, mosquitto / rabbitmq/zeromq, then json-rpc on top ...

I can find socket.io, faye, deepstream.io , autobahn-js and nchan, centrifugo. Can you also explain why you chose it and if you had troubles with some other solution?

For at least 4 years protobuf has had decent support for self-describing messages (very similar to avro) as well as reflection

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

Xgooglers trying to make do on the cheap will just create a Union of all their messages and include the message def in a self-describing message pattern. Super-sensitive network I/O can elide the message def (empty buffer) and any for RecordIO clone well file compression takes care of the definition.

Definitely useful to be able to dig out old defs but protobuf maintainers have surprisingly added useful features so you don’t have to.

Bonus points tho for extracting the protobuf defs that e.g. Apple bakes into their binaries.

gRPC Gateway is a protoc plugin that reads gRPC service definitions and generates a reverse proxy server that translates a RESTful JSON API into gRPC.

To use more recent versions of protoc in future applications, you can download them from the Protobuf repository.

Use the Protobuf CLI protoc and the plugin protoc-gen-tonic.

> didn’t find any standard for separating protobuf messages

The fact that protobufs are not self-delimiting is an endless source of frustration, but I know of 2 standards:

- SerializeDelimited* is part of the protobuf library: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

- Riegeli is "a file format for storing a sequence of string records, typically serialized protocol buffers. It supports dense compression, fast decoding, seeking, detection and optional skipping of data corruption, filtering of proto message fields for even faster decoding, and parallel encoding": https://github.com/google/riegeli

It looks like it is in fact universal. Just glancing at the code here, it looks like the tool searches any arbitrary file for bytes that look like encoded protobuf descriptors, specifically looking for bytes that are plausibly the beginning of a FileDescriptorProto message defined here:

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

This takes advantage of the fact that such descriptors are commonly compiled into programs that use protobuf. The descriptors are usually embedded as constant byte arrays. That said, not all protobuf implementations embed the descriptors and those that do often have an option to inhibit such embedding (at the expense of losing some dynamic introspection features).

Not much. You can check the source code in https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf. For example, for serializing a boolean in C#: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/csharp/src/Google.Protobuf/WritingPrimitives.cs#L165. Strings and objects are a bit more complicated, but it is all about turning the data into its byte representation.

One of the key feature of gRPC is protobuf .proto file(nothing but just a contract for me between two communicator code components) This file and protobuff compiler is so mature, then it generates a direct client implementation using protoccompiler. ref