Re: Protocol Buffers for GWT: Issue 2649

Hi Goktug and Thomas,
   Thank you for your responses. Thomas, I recognize your name immediately. Goktug, I see that you are also a member of the GWT team. Obviously, you are both in a position to know how this feature would best be implemented. If you say that it is better for Protocol Buffer support to be external to GWT (rather than directly baked into GWT), then I can accept that at face value. In either case, we need a solution that we know will be actively maintained by Google.

   Currently, we are developing an educational platform (Android client, iOS client, and GWT web client, hosted on AppEngine) using grants from the National Science Foundation, and from Google itself. We were contacted by Sprint and may partner with them for a large scale (mobile client) deployment of our platform to classrooms here in the United States. As new features and bugfixes are added to the protobuf project, we need to know that Protocol Buffer support for GWT will stay current, for the sake of the teachers and parents that will depend on our web client. We use Protocol Buffers directly in Android, iOS, and AppEngine. But currently, we are stuck maintaining a parallel set of GWT-compatible classes that are translated from Protocol Buffers in AppEngine before being sent to the GWT web client, and vice versa. This is quite cumbersome and will only get worse as we continue development. Naturally, the ideal situation is that the GWT web client can handle the exact same Protocol Buffers that the mobile clients already send and receive. No manual translation in the middle.

    Thomas, I really like your suggestion about using TypedArrays (in browsers that support them) for binary serialization/deserialization, which makes perfect sense since we are dealing with Protocol Buffers. If requiring our users to have only up-to-date modern browsers is the tradeoff, then that is a small price to pay. We'll take it.

Thank you again for your responses.

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