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.
