Question

We are looking to communicate between a .net client and a java server using ‘Protocol Buffers’.

Ideally would would like to use protobuf-net through WCF since all the rest of our communications to other services goes through the WCF stack.

I have a proof of concept .net WCF client talking to a .net WCF server using protobuf-net endpoint behaviour and that seems to work fine.

My question is how would we go about configuring the java server to send the proto-buf to our WCF client? I.e. Do we need to expose the java server to WCF as a SOAP services and send the proto-buf over that?

Answer 1

In that scenario, I would strongly recommend using regular SOAP for the protocol, and exposing a byte[] or Stream (or whatever works) as the payload – and then handle the encoding in your application.

The serializer hooks in WCF mean that it is largely similar to a byte[] payload (on a per-parameter/result basis), but I can’t guarantee that it will be easily deconstructed outside of WCF.

Besides… if you describe it as a SOAP message that includes a BLOB, you are being truthful to SOAP.