Question

What are the avaliable libraries for using protobuf in PHP?

Answer 1

Protocol_Buffer_for_PHP

Last updated in May 2009

Implementing the Google “Protocol Buffer” for PHP, include parsing …

Issue list: http://code.google.com/p/pb4php/issues/list

Protobuf-PHP

Last updated in April 2011

Protobuf for PHP is an implementation of Google’s Protocol Buffers for the PHP language, supporting its binary data serialization and including a protoc plugin to generate PHP classes from .proto files.

Great effort has been put into generating PHP files that include all sort of type hints to aide IDE’s with autocompletion. Therefore, it can not only be used to communicate with Protocol Buffers services but also as a generation tool for data objects no matter what the final serialization is.

Example:

$person = new Tutorial\Person();
$person->name = 'DrSlump';
$person->setId(12);

$book = new Tutorial\AddressBook();
$book->addPerson($person);

// Use default codec
$data = $book->serialize();

// Use custom codec
$codec = new \DrSlump\Protobuf\Codec\Binary();
$data = $codec->encode($book);
// ... or ...
$data = $book->serialize($codec);

protoc-gen-php

Last updated December 05, 2010

This is a PHP Google Protocol Buffer Generator Plugin for protoc. It generates PHP code from a .proto file.