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)

Listing entries

Let us now focus on listing all the entries that are stored in the addressbook.db file. We will first start with the business logic and we will then go to the CLI part of the application.

The business logic

The job left for the CLI to be completed is rather small. We only need to read data from the database and display it on the standard output. Let us start by reading the data from the database:

def list_contacts(db: IO[bytes]):
  book = read_from_db(db)
  #...

Next, we can order the list of contacts alphabetically. This was mostly done for testing purposes, but it could be used for more advanced features such as filtering or paging. Here, we will simply focus on displaying all the contacts. The sorting looks like the following:

def list_contacts(db: IO[bytes]):
  book = read_from_db(db)
  for name in sorted(book.contacts.keys()):
    #...

Now that we have sorted names, we can just display...