Table of Contents

Introduction

Protocol buffers are Google’s language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. Some advantages are:

• Cross platform and language independent
• Backwards-compatible and future-proof
• Focused. Proto schemas describe your data models.

Protobuf was invented by Google, and is a lot smaller and faster than other alternatives like XML.

Example

message Person {
  required string name = 1;
  required int32 id = 2;
  optional string email = 3;
}

While using with Java, this can be used like this:

Person john = Person.newBuilder()
    .setId(1234)
    .setName("John Doe")
    .setEmail("[email protected]")
    .build();
output = new FileOutputStream(args[0]);
john.writeTo(output);

Seems easy, right?

Advantages

• The Builder notation can be used.
• Less boilerplate code.
• Easy to understand

Disadvantages

• Unreadable data
• When the data model is not suited for a schema.
• When data from service is directly consumed by the browser, this can be a problem.

Conclusion

Well, this looks interesting and I would like to know more about it. For now, I won’t be diving deeper, but will definitely consider using protobufs for my next project.