how do protocol buffers work

Full Answer

What does protocol buffer do?

Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data.

Why Protocol buffers are fast?

Protobuf can serialize data so compactly mainly because it does not need to embed the field names as text in the data, possibly many times (“name” and “age” in this example are replaced by short descriptors of 2 bytes).

Why is it called protocol buffer?

Why the name "Protocol Buffers"? The name originates from the early days of the format, before we had the protocol buffer compiler to generate classes for us. At the time, there was a class called ProtocolBuffer which actually acted as a buffer for an individual method.

What companies use protocol buffers?

99 companies reportedly use Protobuf in their tech stacks, including medium.com, Microsoft, and Alibaba Travels.medium.com.Microsoft.Alibaba Travels.Bagelcode.Skyscanner.Figure.Our Stack.Buzzvil.

How efficient is protobuf?

When using Protobuf on a non-compressed environment, the requests took 78% less time than the JSON requests. This shows that the binary format performed almost 5 times faster than the text format. And, when issuing these requests on a compressed environment, the difference was even bigger.

Why protobuf is faster than JSON?

JSON is usually easier to debug (the serialized format is human-readable) and easier to work with (no need to define message types, compile them, install additional libraries, etc.). ProtobufProtobufProtocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Protocol_BuffersProtocol Buffers - Wikipedia, on the other hand, usually compresses data better and has built-in protocol documentation via the schema.

Is Protobuf compressed?

ProtobufProtobufProtocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Protocol_BuffersProtocol Buffers - Wikipedia achieves good compression ratios through varint encoding. It might not be necessary to add an extra layer of compression in most cases.

Is Protobuf a gRPC?

Protocol BufferProtocol BufferProtocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Protocol_BuffersProtocol Buffers - Wikipedia, a.k.a. Protobuf Protobuf is the most commonly used IDL (Interface Definition Language) for gRPC. It's where you basically store your data and function contracts in the form of a proto file.

Can I use gRPC without Protobuf?

Fortunately, gRPC is encoding agnostic! You can still get a lot of the benefits of gRPC without using ProtobufProtobufProtocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Protocol_BuffersProtocol Buffers - Wikipedia. In this post we'll go through how to make gRPC work with other encodings and types.

Are protocol buffers good?

Protocol buffersProtocol buffersWhat are protocol buffers? Protocol buffers are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler.https://developers.google.com › protocol-buffersProtocol Buffers - Google Developers are ideal for any situation in which you need to serialize structured, record-like, typed data in a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible manner. They are most often used for defining communications protocols (together with gRPC) and for data storage.

Is Protobuf human-readable?

Protocol buffersProtocol buffersProtocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Protocol_BuffersProtocol Buffers - Wikipedia are a way of serializing data so that it can be efficiently sent between programs. It is structured in a way that is reminiscent of XML or JSON, but designed to produce much more compact (albeit no longer human-readable) messages.

Is Protobuf a protocol?

We'll let Google explain: "ProtobufProtobufProtocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Protocol_BuffersProtocol Buffers - Wikipedia (Protocol buffers) are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler.

What is faster than Protobuf?

Cap'n Proto is an insanely fast data interchange format and capability-based RPC system. Think JSON, except binary. Or think Protocol BuffersProtocol BuffersProtocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Protocol_BuffersProtocol Buffers - Wikipedia, except faster. In fact, in benchmarks, Cap'n Proto is INFINITY TIMES faster than Protocol Buffers.

Why is gRPC fast?

“gRPC is roughly 7 times faster than REST when receiving data & roughly 10 times faster than REST when sending data for this specific payload. This is mainly due to the tight packing of the Protocol Buffers and the use of HTTP/2 by gRPC.”

What makes gRPC faster?

gRPC can use protocol buffer for data serialization. This makes payloads faster, smaller and simpler. Just like REST, gRPC can be used cross-language which means that if you have written a web service in Golang, a Java written application can still use that web service, which makes gRPC web services very scalable.

Is Protobuf compressed?

ProtobufProtobufProtocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Protocol_BuffersProtocol Buffers - Wikipedia achieves good compression ratios through varint encoding. It might not be necessary to add an extra layer of compression in most cases.

What Are Protocol Buffers?

Protocol buffers are a method of serializing data tha t can be transmitted over wire or be stored in files. The other formats like JSON and XML are also used for serializing data. Although these platforms have proved themselves to be extremely flexible and effective, one place where they aren’t fully optimized is scenarios where the data is to be transmitted between multiple microservices in a platform-neutral way.

Why are protocol buffers better than JSON?

We’ve seen that protocol buffers are designed to be more efficient and faster than conventional data-transmission formats like JSON or XML. The compression of data can increase the speed and reduce the CPU usage.

What is the most important component of Protobuf?

The most important component of Protobuf is the protoc compiler. Installation of protoc is as follows:

What is protobuf transfer?

Binary transfer format. The Protobuf is a binary transfer format, meaning the data is transmitted as a binary. This improves the speed of transmission more than the raw string because it takes less space and bandwidth. Since the data is compressed, the CPU usage will also be less.

What are the different types of data types in Protobuf?

The scalar data types available in Protobuf are float, int32, int64, uint32, uint64, sint32, sint64, fixed32, fixed64, sfixed32, sfixed6, bool, string, and bytes.

What language is protobuf?

Initially, the Protobuf was created for three primary languages — C++, Java, and Python. Over the course of years, many languages like Go, Ruby, JS, PHP, C#, and Objective-C have also started supporting Protobufs. The current version of Protobuf is called proto3. Like JSON and XML, the Protobufs are language and platform-neutral.

How to name fields in Protobuf?

When naming the fields in Protobuf, there are some conventions to be followed because these are assumed by the Protoc compiler as it generates code based on the .proto file for the language of your selection. The first convention is field names should all be in lowercase. Secondly, if there are multiple words in the field name, they should be separated by an underscore.

What is a protocol buffer?

Protocol Buffers ( Protobuf) is a free and open source cross-platform library used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data.

What is Protobuf 2.0?

Protobuf 2.0 provides a code generator for C++, Java, C#, and Python.

What is a protocol buffer?

Protocol buffers also known as Protobuf are an efficient and flexible mechanism for serializing structured data. Protobuf works in a way where you define the data to be structured once and then with a specially generated source code you can read and write your structured data.

What languages can you use a protocol buffer in?

Protocol buffers are language-neutral and platform-neutral, at a time when this post is written they have support for Java, Python, Objective-C, and C++, also with the new proto3 language version, you can also use them with Dart, Go, Ruby, and C#, with more languages to come.

How long does it take to parse a Protobuf?

When the above message is encoded to the Protobuf binary code format is 28 bytes long and will take around 100-200 nanoseconds to parse. For comparison, the XML version is at least 69 bytes and would take around 5,000-10,000 nanoseconds to parse. Manipulating protocol buffer is also easier compared to XML. Let's see them both in the examples below.

What are the message types in proto files?

The value types can be booleans, integer, floating-point, strings, raw bytes, or other protocol buffer message types, allowing you to structure your data hierarchically. When you finish defining the messages, you run the protocol buffer compiler for the particular application language that you are using on your proto file to generate data access classes. This will provide getters and setters for each field also methods to serialize/parse the structure to and from raw bytes.

Is protocol buffer only a message format?

On the other hand protocol buffers are not only a message format. It is a set of rules and tools that define and exchange messages. Currently is restricted to only some programming languages. Also, it has more data types than JSON, like methods, enumerates, and has other functions, including RPC (Remote Procedure Calls).

Is protocol buffer better than JSON?

Conclusion. As Protocol buffers are a great modern method for serializing structured data they also offer some nice advantages over JSON and XML, while it is still not a full JSON replacement, protocol buffers offer its greatest advantages in terms of speed, encoding and decoding size of the data. Tweet.

What is Protobuf (Protocol Buffers)?

Protocol Buffers, or Protobuf for short, a data interchange format originally developed for internal use, has been offered to the general public as an open source project (partly Apache 2.0 license) by Google since 2008. The binary format enables applications to store as well as exchange structured data in an uncomplicated way, whereby these programs can even be written in different programming languages. The following, including others, are supported languages:

How to serialize a protocol buffer?

For each structure that you want to serialize in this file - that is, map in succession - simply add a message. Then you specify names and types for each field of this message and append the desired modifier (s). One modifier is required per field.

What is protobuf vs. JSON?

Also, with the JavaScript markup language JSON ( J ava S cript O bject N otation), Protocol Buffers often makes a direct comparison, whereby it should be mentioned that both technologies were designed with different objectives: JSON is a message format which originated from JavaScript, which exchanges its messages in text format and is supported by practically all common programming languages. The functionality of Protobuf includes more than one message format, as Google technology also offers various rules and tools for defining and exchanging messages. Protobuf also generally outperforms JSON when you look at the sending of messages in general, but the following tabular “Protobuf vs. JSON” list shows that both structuring techniques have their advantages and disadvantages:

How does protobuf work?

With Protobuf coding, you automatically use modifiers (optional: required, optional or repeated) which simplify the programming work considerably. This way the structuring method allows you to determine data structure at scheme level, whereupon the implementation details of the classes used for the different programming languages are automatically regulated. You can also change the status at any time, for example from "required" to "optional". The transport of data structures can also be regulated using Protocol Buffers: Through the coding of generic query and response structures, a flexible and secure data transfer between multiple services is ensured in a simple manner.

Why use protobuf?

The implementation of Protobuf spares the annoying execution of version checks, which is usually associated with "ugly" code. In order to maintain backward compatibility with older versions or forward compatibility with new versions, Protocol Buffers uses numbered fields that serve as reference points for accessing services. This means you do not always have to adapt the entire code in order to publish new features and functions.

What is protobuf in programming?

It is part of today's standard, that applications are no longer simply written in one language, but that program parts or modules combine different language types. Protobuf simplifies interaction between the individual code components considerably.

What is protobuf in Ruby?

Protobuf is used in combination with HTTP and RPCs (Remote Procedure Calls) for local and remote client-server communication - to describe the interfaces required here. The protocol composition is also called gRPC. In order to protect your privacy, the video will not load until you click on it.

What is Swift Protobuf?

Swift Protobuf allows you to use protocol buffers in your Xcode project. Alamofire is a HTTP networking library that you will use to make requests to the server. Note: In this tutorial you will use Swift Protobuf 0.9.24 and Google’s Protoc Compiler 3.1.0.

How to use a.proto file?

With a .proto file defined, all you have to do is pass the file into the protocol buffer compiler, and it will generate data access classes ( structs in S wift) in the supported languages of your choice. You can then use the classes/structs generated in the project you are working with. It’s that simple!

What is contact.proto?

contact.proto describes how a contact should be structured using the protocol buffer language. You’ll dive deeper into this later.

What does the compiler do?

The compiler will interpret the message, map the value types to the chosen language and generate the appropriate model object files. You’ll cover more on how to define a message later.

How does a protocol buffer work?

Protocol buffer works through binary serialization. It encodes the data using the determined schema and sends the data.

What are Protocol Buffers?

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient way of serializing structured data. you define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to write and read your structured data.

Why are protocol buffers more than JSON?

Why Protocol buffers over JSON. Firstly, protocol buffers have more data types than JSON. Protocol buffers are not only a message format, but it is also a set of rules and tools that defines the exchange of messages.

What is receiver decoding?

The receiver decodes the data with the same schema and get the message from the binary stream.

Summary

Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a free and open-source cross-platform data format used to serialize structured data. It is useful in developing programs to communicate with each other over a network or for storing data. The method involves an interface description language that describes the structure of some data and a program that generates source code from that description for generating or parsing a stream of bytes that represents the structured data.

Overview

Example

Language support

See also

External links