A Ruby gem for Google's Protocol Buffers messages using three different encodings JSON based syntax instead of the original binary protocol. Supported formats - Hashmap: A tipical JSON message, with key:value pairs where the key is a string representing the field name. - Tagmap: Very similar to Hashmap, but instead of having the field name as key it has the field tag number as defined in the proto definition. - Indexed: Takes the Tagmap format a further step and optimizes the size needed for tag numbers by packing all of them as a string, where each character represents a tag, and placing it as the first element of an array.