Fast and Compact Serialization
MessagePack is a binary-based efficient object serialization library. It enables to exchange structured objects between many languages like JSON. But unlike JSON, it is very fast and small.
Typical small integer (like flags or error code) is saved only in 1 byte, and typical short string only needs 1 byte except the length of the string itself. [1,2,3] (3 elements array) is serialized in 4 bytes using MessagePack as follows:
> require 'msgpack' > msg = [1,2,3].to_msgpack #=> "\x93\x01\x02\x03" > MessagePack.unpack(msg) #=> [1,2,3]
Scalable RPC
MessagePack-RPC is cross-language RPC library for client, server and cluster applications. Because it releases you from complicated network programming completely and provides well-designed API, you can easily implement advanced network applications with MessagePack-RPC.
require 'msgpack/rpc'
class MyHandler
def add(x,y) return x+y end
end
svr = MessagePack::RPC::Server.new
svr.listen('0.0.0.0', 18800, MyHandler.new)
svr.run
require 'msgpack/rpc'
c = MessagePack::RPC::Client.new('127.0.0.1',18800)
result = c.call(:add, 1, 2) #=> 3
Serialization + Desrialization Speed Test
In this test (source code), it measured the elapsed time of serializing and deserializing 200,000 target objects. The target object consists of the three integers and 512 bytes string.
RPC Feature Comparision
| MessagePack-RPC | Thrift | Avro | |
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| Asynchronous RPC |  |
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| Parallel Pipelining | |
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| Thrift IDL | |
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| Dynamic Typing | |
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| Connection pooling | |
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| Delayed return | |
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| Event-driven I/O | |
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Information of these related projects are available from: JSON, Protocol Buffers, Thrift, Avro.
