eProsima

eProsima Fast Buffers is a high-performance library designed to serialize structured data. You have to define your structured data once, and then you can use specific generated source code to easily serialize and deserialize it in different operating systems.

To declare your structured data, you have to use IDL (Interface Definition Language) format. IDL is a specification language, made by OMG (Object Management Group), which describes an interface in a language-independent way, enabling communication between software components that do not share the same language.

The main component of eProsima Fast Buffers is a tool that reads IDL files and parses a subset of the OMG IDL specification to generate serialization source code. The rest of the file content is ignored.

eProsima Fast Buffers has another relevant component: a C++11 library which provides different serialization mechanisms. Currently two serialization mechanisms are supported: One of them is the standard CDR (Common Data Representation). CDR is a transfer syntax low-level representation for transfer between agents, mapping from data types defined in OMG IDL to byte streams. The other one is a modified implementation of CDR, which has an overwhelming speed-up compared to the classical approach. The reason why this implementation is faster is because it does not use some of the features of the standard CDR serialization, in order to improve performance.

One of the main features of eProsima Fast Buffers is it avoids users from knowing anything about serialization or deserialization procedures. For that task, it provides a homogeneous API which supports serialization of several different data types.