stargate VS Protobuf

They suggested https://stargate.io

- https://github.com/stargate/stargate

Datastax Astra is built on Apache Cassandra. In addition to great documentation, Astra offers a robust free tier that can run small production workloads, pet projects, or just let you play—all for free, no credit card required. Cassandra can be tricky for hardcore SQL developers, because it uses a different slightly different query language (CQL), but when you get Astra, Stargate is there to let you interact with your data through APIs. Our open source Stargate product provides REST, GraphQL, and schemaless document APIs in addition to native language drivers. If you like them but don’t want to use our products, that’s fine! It’s completely open source and you can implement it on your own system.

DataStax built Stargate into Astra to give us, app developers, a natural data API stack which meshes with the Jamstack (or serverless stack of your choice). Stargate in Astra is built on the rock solid NoSQL data engine (Apache Cassandra) which powers Netflix, Instagram, Yelp, iCloud and other apps we all use everyday.

To make it easy for your app to interact with the database, we created Stargate.io. It’s an open-source data gateway with three APIs that work with Astra DB right out of the box. Instead of having to read up on different APIs and databases, all you have to do is pick one of the three Stargate APIs and get to work on your application.

Twelve-plus years after its invention, Cassandra is now used by approximately 90 percent of the Fortune 100, and it’s appeal is broadening quickly, driven by a rush to harness today’s “data deluge” with apps that are globally distributed and always-on. Add to this recent advances in the Cassandra ecosystem such as Stargate, K8ssandra, and cloud services like Astra DB, and the cost and complexity barriers to using Cassandra are fading into the past. So while it’s fair to say that while Cassandra might have been ahead of its time in 2007, it’s primed and ready for the data demands of the 2020s and beyond.

Until now, aggregate functions were only available using cqlsh (the CQL Shell). However, with the Stargate 1.0.25 release, they are now also available using the GraphQL API. In this blog entry, I’ll walk you through the process to get early access to this exciting new functionality in Stargate, and how to set up everything you need to test your own aggregate queries.

Stargate is an open-source data gateway that makes it simple to query any Cassandra database using GraphQL types, queries, and mutations. When you add the Stargate GraphQL API to a Cassandra deployment, it scans the database and automatically creates HTTP endpoints with GraphQL queries and mutations for the objects it finds.

BattleStax is implemented as a JAMStack app that uses Stargate, Netlify, DataStax Astra DB, and GitHub to demonstrate how to build and deploy an application using modern, scalable architectures. In this post, we’ll break down the video to help you quickly create your own BattleStax game using React and Redux — implemented with a CI/CD pipeline, global content delivery network (CDN), and Apache Cassandra®.

It's because they changed the versioning format: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases?page=5

But I suppose old version still receive bugfixes.

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.