New Java Protocol Buffers Parser/Code Generator

["hiram@hiramchirino.com" <ch...@gmail.com>]

Hi Guys,

First off, I want to thank Google for contributing such a great
project.  I wanted to let you guys know that there's now a new Java
based parser/code generator which might interest some of you guys.

The source for it is at:
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/activemq/sandbox/activemq-protobuf

My use case for the protobuf is to use it as the next generation of
the wire encoding used in the Apache ActiveMQ message broker.  For
those of you know don't know, ActiveMQ is an open source JMS provider.

In this narrow use case, the use of the builder pattern makes it a bit
more cumbersome to work with the messages.  This version of the code
generator, uses the standard Java Bean getter/setter pattern.  We also
don't need to track unknown fields, message extensions, or use the
reflection bits.  So it leaves all those parts un-implemented.  So I'm
not sure it can be considered a general purpose implementation of
protocol buffers.  It's a lean and mean, 'you better know what your
doing' implementation.

It implements a Java based compiler with an associated maven plugin so
you can easily use it in your maven builds.  Ant task would be trivial
to implement, but have not done so just because the build systems I
work with are maven based.

It has a dependency on protobuf-java-2.0.1rc1.jar since it's using
it's CodedInput/OutputStreams but unfortunately there were a few handy
classes that had to be copied from protobuf-java implementation
because of visibility issues.  Hopefully, we can work together and get
some of those APIs exposed a bit so that our module can remove the
copies.

Regards,
Hiram