ObjectiveAvro is a wrapper on Avro-C, following the API conventions of Foundation's NSJSONSerialization class.

From Avro Documentation:

Apache Avro™ is a data serialization system.

Avro provides:

• Rich data structures.
• A compact, fast, binary data format.
• A container file, to store persistent data.
• Remote procedure call (RPC).
• Simple integration with dynamic languages. Code generation is not required to read or write data files nor to use or implement RPC protocols. Code generation as an optional optimization, only worth implementing for statically typed languages.

Basically, you can serialize data to a fast and compact binary format (which is very handy on a mobile device!). However, there isn't an official API for Objective-C, only C, C++, C#, Java and Python. ObjectiveAvro is the midfield between your Objective-C code and Avro-C.

Avro works with schemas. Before using OAVAvroSerialization to serialize objects, you must register the schemas you'll use.

NSString *schema = @"{\"type\":\"record\",\"name\":\"Person\",\"namespace\":\"com.movile.objectiveavro.unittest.v1\",\"fields\":[{\"name\":\"name\",\"type\":\"string\"},{\"name\":\"country\",\"type\":\"string\"},{\"name\":\"age\",\"type\":\"int\"}]}";

OAVAvroSerialization *avro = [[OAVAvroSerialization alloc] init];
NSError *error;
BOOL result = [avro registerSchema:schema error:&error];

NSError *error;
NSDictionary *dict = @{@"name": @"Marcelo Fabri", @"country": @"Brazil", @"age": @20};
NSData *data = [avro dataFromJSONObject:dict forSchemaNamed:@"Person" error:&error];

NSError *error;
NSData *data = [NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"marcelo" ofType:@"avro"]];
NSData *data = [avro JSONObjectFromData:data forSchemaNamed:@"Person" error:&error];

ObjectiveAvro requires Xcode 5, targeting either iOS 6.0 and above, or Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion (64-bit with modern Cocoa runtime) and above.

ObjectiveAvro also requires Avro-C, which is automatically imported when using CocoaPods.

ObjectiveAvro is available through CocoaPods, to install it simply add the following line to your Podfile:

pod "ObjectiveAvro"

To run the testing project; clone the repo, and run pod install from the Example directory first. You can run the unit tests by pressing CMD + U on Xcode. Tests are done with XCTest and Expecta.

• Currently, only the following types are supported: string, float, double, int, long, boolean, null, bytes, array, map and record. That means that enum, union and fixed are not currently supported.

Marcelo Fabri, [email protected]

ObjectiveAvro is available under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more info.