Chapter 2 Structure Data with Protocol Buffers

Distributed Services with Go — by Travis Jeffery (16 / 84)

👈 What You Learned | TOC | Why Use Protocol Buffers? 👉

When building distributed services, you’re communicating between the services over a network. To send data (such as your structs) over a network, you need to encode the data in a format to transmit, and lots of programmers choose JSON. When you’re building public APIs or you’re creating a project where you don’t control the clients, JSON makes sense because it’s accessible — both for humans to read and computers to parse. But when you’re building private APIs or building projects where you do control the clients, you can make use of a mechanism for structuring and transmitting data that — compared to JSON — makes you more productive and helps you create services that are faster, have more features, and have fewer bugs.

So what is this mechanism? Protocol buffers (also known as protobuf), which is Google’s language and platform-neutral extensible mechanism for structuring and serializing data. The advantages of using protobuf are that it:

• Guarantees type-safety;
• Prevents schema-violations;
• Enables fast serialization; and
• Offers backward compatibility.

Protobuf lets you define how you want your data structured, compile your protobuf into code in potentially many languages, and then read and write your…