Curious to see how our approach here compares to https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/ .
PHP: https://github.com/allegro/php-protobuf/
thanks
Topic on Talk:Requests for comment/Structured logging
I think protocol buffers are solving a slightly different problem. They allow for specification of a rigid message structure with efficient binary representation such as would typically be used for some sort of interprocess (and possibly inter-language) message passing. For event logging I think that having a rigid message structure is unwanted. Not all events will look alike and thus not all events will contain the exact same fields. We are looking to specify a "core" set of fields but would like the ability to invent additional ones as appropriate. I think there are also advantages to using plain text rather than binary formats. Plain text is more easily debugged and manipulated with a variety of tools which supports the primary use case of recording events so that developers and operational support teams can debug runtime issues.
Protocol Buffers requires defining the whole format with all the keys beforehand and outputs binary. The RFC seems to suggest simple JSON which is a good format for data with variable keys, especially if it's supposed to be consumed by a variety of things. Even 3rd party logging services like Loggly accept JSON.