LUKI NOTES

We have understood a few advantages of protocol buffer like what I've explained in my other post . Now, let's look at how we can implement it in our code. The "transpiler" tool, named protoc , supports the generation of a helper class for managing the object instance in a variety of programming languages. In this post, we use Javascript as an example and run in a Linux environment. Preparation Before we develop our code, we should install protoc for generating the helper class. Download protoc binary from the release page . Extract the content and store the directories  ( bin  and  includes ) in /usr/local  directory so that the executable binary can be accessed directly. Run protoc --help to check its manual. Install a required dependency globally to enable protoc  to generate the Javascript files by running: npm i -g protoc-gen-js . Create a proto file First, we should create an ...

A protocol buffer is a mechanism to share objects between machines which is language agnostic and has a target to reduce the payload size. We are already common with JSON which is used by most RESTful APIs to send/receive objects to/from any kind of client. JSON is already convenient and supported by many platforms, but, why we should know about the protocol buffer. Besides the optimization of payload encoding, protocol buffer which is also called  protobuf introduces schema definition that should be maintained by the machines to encode or decode the objects delivered. The main processes for delivering the objects are called serialization and deserialization. Serialization is the process of transforming an object instance in an application into an optimized binary payload. Deserialization is the process of decoding the binary data into the desired object. Let's take a look at the following table that shows a comparison of XML, JSON, and protobuf. ...