FastProto
Annotation-driven binary protocol serialization for Java.
Designed for IoT, automotive, industrial control & energy metering.
Overview
What is FastProto?
FastProto is a high-performance Java library for binary protocol serialization and deserialization. Define complex byte-stream structures with annotations — no manual bit-shifting, no boilerplate. Built for production use cases including IoT gateways, CAN bus parsers, UART framing and Modbus register mapping.
- Declarative over imperative: Protocol structure expressed through annotations — the code reads like the protocol spec.
- Performance with maintainability: Reflection metadata cached at startup; encode/decode paths are allocation-light.
- Grounded in engineering reality: Mixed endianness, sub-byte fields, BCD encoding, CRC variants — all handled natively.
Key features
Map binary data to Java fields via simple annotations.
Primitives, unsigned, strings, time, arrays and collections.
Reverse addressing for variable-length packets.
Big-endian or little-endian; MSB/LSB bit ordering.
Apply lambdas or classes to transform values on encode/decode.
Single annotation: CRC8/16/32/64, LRC, XOR, sum.
Fluent builder and static helpers for all use cases.
Basic usage
Annotate fields, call FastProto.decode — done.
import org.indunet.fastproto.FastProto;
import org.indunet.fastproto.annotation.UInt8Type;
public class Packet {
@UInt8Type(offset = 0) int id;
}
byte[] bytes = new byte[]{1};
Packet p = FastProto.decode(bytes, Packet.class);
byte[] out = FastProto.encode(p, 1);Documentation
Guides to get you up and running:
Installation
Available on Maven Central. Requires Java 8+.
Maven
<dependency>
<groupId>org.indunet</groupId>
<artifactId>fastproto</artifactId>
<version>4.1.0</version>
</dependency>Gradle
implementation "org.indunet:fastproto:4.1.0"Open source. Released under the Apache License 2.0. Source on GitHub. Artifacts on Maven Central.