What are Protocol Buffers and why they are widely used?
Hello everyone. In this article, we are going to look at one of the interesting topics — Protocol Buffers, which are called Protobuf in short. Protocol buffers are a method of serializing data like XML and JSON and are very efficient and super fast over the network. Let us see about Protobuf in detail and go through the Java code to understand it better.
What is Protobuf?
To make remote procedure calls, we need a way to transform objects (payload) in memory into bytes such that they can be transmitted to the other systems as shown below. There are many names for it: serialization, marshaling, encoding, etc
A lot of programming languages support these mechanisms by default and they often use JSON format. It is a human-readable format and is widely used. But JSON tends to be slower and get bigger in size when we use it with big data or when a number of microservices communicate with each other. JSON also has forward and backward compatibility issues.
To address these issues, google introduced Protobuf in 2008. Protobuf is an Interface Definition Language that is language-neutral and…
