[erlang-questions] Announce: the Piqi project

[Torben Hoffmann]

Hi Anton,

It looks very interesting - in fact so much that I will ask a few questions
(always a good sign, right?).

On the higher level: Are there any plans for providing a way to specify your
own binary encoding?

On the lower level: If I have a PDU where one field is present if another
field has a specific value how would that look in Piqi? And what if the
dependent field is separated from its condition field by many other fields?

Example: (M means mandatory, C means conditional)

Field1 M
Field2 M
.
Field15 C - present if Field2 is 4.

I am dealing with a protocol that has this kind of behaviour and I am
looking into writing my own binary grammar, but I would much rather piggy
bag on something else if many reasons on top of laziness ;-)

Cheers,
Torben

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 10:07, Anton Lavrik <alavrik@REDACTED> wrote:

>
> It is my pleasure to announce the Piqi project to the Erlang community.
> I've
> just released a new version which features Erlang support.
>
>
> Piqi is a cross-language data serialization system compatible with Google
> Protocol Buffers with native support for Erlang and OCaml.
>
> OCaml and Erlang programmers can use Piqi to conveniently serialize and
> deserialize data using a portable binary format which can be understood by
> programs written in Python, Java, C++ and other languages supported by
> Google
> Protocol Buffers. In this sense, Piqi provides Protocol Buffers support for
> OCaml and Erlang.
>
> Compared to Protocol Buffers, Piqi relies on a richer data definition
> language
> which has a more natural mapping to functional languages. For instance, in
> addition to records and enums, Piqi supports variants (tagged unions),
> variant
> subtyping, lists and type aliases.
>
> Some other Piqi features include:
> - Support for data schema evolution (Protocol Buffers style).
> - "import" and "include" for reusing type definitions from other modules.
> - Powerful extensions mechanism for records and variants.
> - Structured default values for optional fields.
>
> Compatibility between Piqi and Protocol Buffers is maintained as follows:
> - Piqi specifications can be automatically converted to equivalent Protobuf
>  specifications and vice versa (with very few exceptions).
> - Piqi and Protocol Buffers use the same binary encoding as a serialization
>  format.
>
> Piqi comes with several additional tools:
> - Piq -- a high-level data representation language. It has full support for
> Piqi
>  data types and it is easier to read, write and edit compared to XML or
> JSON.
> - Piqi tools for validating, pretty-printing and converting data between
> Piq,
>  JSON and portable binary encoding.
>
>
> Erlang support highlights
> =========================
>
> - Generated Erlang type and record definitions as well as
>  serialization/deserialization code are EEP8-compliant and provide all
> necessary
>  type information for Dialyzer.
>
> - Support for recursive record types.
>
> - Support for Unicode strings which can be passed as string() (i.e. list of
>  Unicode codepoints) or utf-8 binary().
>
> - Support for custom Erlang identifiers. For example, if some identifier
> from
>  existing Proto or Piqi specification conflicts with an Erlang keyword, it
> is
>  possible to define a custom Erlang-specific identifier without changing
> the
>  original one and breaking backward compatibility.
>
> - Capitalized and "CamelCase" Piqi/Protobuf identifiers are automatically
>  converted to uncapitalized and "camel_case" Erlang ids.
>
> - Configurable prefixes for type and record identifiers (since Erlang
> doesn't
>  have any kind of namespace support for types and records, we need to
> prefix
>  them to avoid conflicts with names defined in other modules).
>
> - Tested with Erlang/OTP R13B04 and R14A.
>
>
> Further references
> ==================
>
> Homepage:
>
>        http://piqi.org
>
> GitHub repository and several Erlang examples:
>
>        http://github.com/alavrik/piqi
>        http://github.com/alavrik/piqi/tree/master/examples/addressbook/
>
> Details of Piqi to Erlang mapping:
>
>        http://piqi.org/doc/mappings/erlang/
>
>
> Your comments, suggestions and contributions are welcome! Don't hesitate to
> contact me if you have any questions.
>
>
> Anton
>
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