Book Image

Protocol Buffers Handbook

By : Clément Jean
Book Image

Protocol Buffers Handbook

By: Clément Jean

Overview of this book

Explore how Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) serialize structured data and provides a language-neutral, platform-neutral, and extensible solution. With this guide to mastering Protobuf, you'll build your skills to effectively serialize, transmit, and manage data across diverse platforms and languages. This book will help you enter the world of Protocol Buffers by unraveling the intricate nuances of Protobuf syntax and showing you how to define complex data structures. As you progress, you’ll learn schema evolution, ensuring seamless compatibility as your projects evolve. The book also covers advanced topics such as custom options and plugins, allowing you to tailor validation processes to your specific requirements. You’ll understand how to automate project builds using cutting-edge tools such as Buf and Bazel, streamlining your development workflow. With hands-on projects in Go and Python programming, you’ll learn how to practically apply Protobuf concepts. Later chapters will show you how to integrate data interchange capabilities across different programming languages, enabling efficient collaboration and system interoperability. By the end of this book, you’ll have a solid understanding of Protobuf internals, enabling you to discern when and how to use and redefine your approach to data serialization.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Defining the schema

Disclaimer

Once again, this section is here for readers who skipped Chapter 7. The only difference is the code generation with protoc, which happens in the last few paragraphs, and the omission of the go_package option.

Starting a project involving Protobuf always starts by defining the schema. This is known as schema-driven development (SDD). We essentially define the contract that needs to be fulfilled.

We are going to take a bottom-up approach to design this schema. We are going to start by defining what a Person contact looks like. As we saw in the description of the project, a person can have an email and multiple phone numbers. This looks like the following (proto/addressbook.proto):

message Person {
  //...
  string email = 1;
  repeated PhoneNumber phones = 2;
}

While the email is simply a string, the phone number will be represented by a nested message. This is because we want to be able to store the phone number...