catalyst-network-protocol-protobuffs

The Catalyst Network protocol is defined using the Protobuffs seralisation format.

Build Status

What's a Protobuff?

From Google - https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/

Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data.

Why Protobuffs

Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format.

From Google - https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview

Protocol buffers have many advantages over XML for serializing structured data. Protocol buffers are:

• simpler,
• 3 to 10 times smaller,
• 20 to 100 times faster,
• less ambiguous and
• generate data access classes that are easier to use programmatically

But the biggest benefit to Catalyst Network is the interoperability offered by protobuffs. Protobuffs are implemented in a variety of languages and allow us to quickly generate code for you to interact and build upon the Catalyst Network! No more figuring out some obscure language or having to learn snowflaked schemas.

Install Protobuffs

To install protobuffs on Ubuntu:

• Make sure you grab the latest version
  • $ curl -OL https://github.com/google/protobuf/releases/download/v3.2.0/protoc-3.2.0-linux-x86_64.zip
• Unzip
  • $ unzip protoc-3.2.0-linux-x86_64.zip -d protoc3
• Move protoc to /usr/local/bin/
  • $ sudo mv protoc3/bin/* /usr/local/bin/
• Move protoc3/include to /usr/local/include/
  • $ sudo mv protoc3/include/* /usr/local/include/
• Optional: change owner
  • $ sudo chwon [USER] /usr/local/bin/protoc
  • $ sudo chwon -R [USER] /usr/local/include/google