Working with Protocol Buffers and GRPC

In this chapter, we are going to enter the world of protocol buffers. We are going to discover the benefits of using protocol buffers instead of JSON, and where to use both. We will use Google's proto library to compile protocol buffers. We will try to write a few web services with protocol buffers that can talk to either Go, or other applications such as Python, NodeJS, and so on. Then, we will explain GRPC, an advanced simplified form of RPC. We will learn how GRPC and protocol buffers can help us build services that can be consumed by any client. We will also discuss HTTP/2 and its benefits over plain HTTP/1.1 JSON-based services.

In short, we will cover the following topics:

• Protocol buffers introduction
• Format of the protocol buffers
• Compilation process of a protobuf
• GRPC, a modern RPC library
• Bidirectional streaming with GRPC
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