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)

Interoperability between Go and Python

The last thing that is important to note is that not only have we created the application in two languages, but we created two applications that can both understand the data serialized in addressbook.db.

Say we serialized data with the Go application, like the following:

$ cd chapter7
$ go run . add --kind per --name John --email [email protected]

We can list all the elements of chapter7/addressbook.db with the Python CLI, like so:

$ cd chapter7
$ python ../chapter8/main.py list
name: John
last_updated: 03/26/2024 00:13:04
person {
  email: "[email protected]"
}
-----------------------

Inversely, we can serialize data in Python:

$ cd chapter8
$ python main.py add --kind per --name John --email [email protected]

We can also list the elements with the Go CLI:

$ cd chapter7
$ go build –o addressbook
$ cd ../chapter8
$ ../chapter7/addressbook list
name: John
last_updated: 03/26/2024 00:16:34
person...