This article describes how to develop an Android application using protobuf and Eclipse.

1. Build protoc, Protobuf compiler.

Android supports only protobuf 2.3.0. If protoc 2.3.0 is not installed in your system, build one.

1. Download protobuf-2.3.0.tar.gz
2. Build it.

# tar xvzf protobuf-2.3.0.tar.gz
# cd protobuf-2.3.0
# ./configure
# make
# make install

Note: If you have Android platform source code, you can skip building protoc. You can find aprotoc under android/prebuilt/bin/aprotoc, which is a renamed copy of protoc 2.3.0.

2. Install protobuf-dt (and xtext)

3. Configure protobuf-dt

• locate protoc
• change src output folder
• enable building .proto files

4. Add java library

As said earlier, Android supports protobuf 2.3.0. And Java version of it doesn’t have support for full version. Thus use ‘lite’ version for your application.

Add protobuf-java-2.3.0-lite.jar to your project. You can download it here.

5. Add .proto file

example.proto

specifying Java class

Use lite version