RProtoBuf 0.4.2

A new release 0.4.2 of RProtoBuf is now on CRAN. RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("Protobuf") data encoding library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects.

Murray and Jeroen did almost all of the heavy lifting. Many changes were triggered by two helpful referee reports, and we are slowly getting to the point where we will resubmit a much improved paper. Full details are below.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.2 (2014-12-10)

• Address changes suggested by anonymous reviewers for our Journal of Statistical Software submission.

• Make Descriptor and EnumDescriptor objects subsettable with "[[".

• Add length() method for Descriptor objects.

• Add names() method for Message, Descriptor, and EnumDescriptor objects.

• Clarify order of returned list for descriptor objects in as.list documentation.

• Correct the definition of as.list for EnumDescriptors to return a proper list instead of a named vector.

• Update the default print methods to use cat() with fill=TRUE instead of show() to eliminate the confusing [1] since the classes in RProtoBuf are not vectorized.

• Add support for serializing function, language, and environment objects by falling back to R’s native serialization with serialize_pb and unserialize_pb to make it easy to serialize into a Protocol Buffer all of the more than 100 datasets which come with R.

• Use normalizePath instead of creating a temporary file with file.create when getting absolute path names.

• Add unit tests for all of the above.

CRANberries also provides a diff to the previous release. RProtoBuf page which has a draft package vignette, a a ‘quick’ overview vignette, and a unit test summary vignette. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.