A Beginners Guide to Understanding Protobuf & JSON When you dive into the sphere of data serialization, you're likely to encounter two dominant players – Protobuf, the colloquial term for Protocol Buffers, and JSON, standing for JavaScript Object Notation. Both of these formats carry distinctive qualities, with each boasting specific advantages in data exchange scenarios. Through this primer, our goal is to dissect and explore the fundamentals of Protobuf and JSON, equipping you with the necessary groundwork for the more detailed reflections that will follow. Protocol Buffers, or Protobuf as most individuals refer to it, was conceived and pursued by Internet behemoth Google. Popular for its binary serialization, Protobuf upholds the principles of brevity, nimbleness, and simplicity while not conceding on its expressive prowess. It's not constrained by programming language frontiers and offers compatibility with a multitude of languages such as Java, C++, Python, Go, and many others. A basic Protobuf message would resemble this: <code class="language-protobuf">message Person { required string name = 1; required int32 idNumber = 2; optional string email = 3; }</code> In contrast, JSON – a data interchange format rooted in text, stands out for its effortless comprehensibility by humans and ease of processing for machines. Drawing its core layout from JavaScript, it has established itself as a universal format, finding extensive use in web application data transmission…Read More
Protobuf vs JSON
