Ljubljana, Slovenia

Protobuf

Tue, Dec 3, 2019

Go: Introduction to Protobuf: gRPC

We implemented a Twitch RPC generator in the previous chapter, but we do have some hard core gRPC fans that requested that I should check out what gRPC produces. I am interested into comparing these two as well, so let’s start by scaffolding our gRPC handlers. Our main goal is to compare the implementation details of gRPC over Twitch RPC in more concrete terms.

Go: Introduction to Protobuf: Services

The next step (or possibly the first step) about implementing a microservice, is defining it’s API endpoints. What people usually do is write http handlers and resort to a routing framework like go-chi/chi. But, protocol buffers can define your service, as RPC calls definitions are built into the protobuf schema.

Go: Introduction to Protobuf: Messages

In it’s most basic ways, protocol buffers or protobufs are an approach to serialize structured data with minimal overhead. They require that the data structures be known and compatible between the client and server, unlike JSON where the structure itself is part of the encoding.