gson vs protocol buffer

Question

What are the pros and cons of protocol buffer (protobuf) over GSON?

In what situation protobuf is more appropriate than GSON?

I am sorry for a very generic question.

Answer 1

Both json (via the gson library) and protobuf are portable between platorms; but

• protobuf is smaller (bandwidth) and cheaper (CPU) to read/write
• json is human readable / editable (protobuf is binary; hard to parse without library support)
• protobuf is trivial to merge fragments - just concatenate
• json is easily passed to web page clients
• the main java version of protobuf needs contract-definition (.proto) and code-generation; gson seems to allow arbitrary pojo usage (there are protobuf implementations that work on such objects, but not for java afaik)

If performance is key : protubuf

For use with a web page (JavaScript), or human readable: json (perhaps via gson)