gRPC & Protocol Buffers: High Performance APIs

protocolbuffers/protobuf: Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format @ GitHub

Building High Performance APIs In Go Using gRPC And Protocol Buffers

"Protocol Buffers, also referred as protobuf, is Google’s language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. Protocol Buffers are smaller, faster, and simpler that provides high performance than other standards such as XML and JSON. 

By using protocol buffers, you can define your structured data, then you generate source code for your choice of programming language using the protocol buffer compiler named protoc, to write and read your structured data using it. The current version of protocol buffers is proto3. The proto3 version currently supports generated code in variety of languages including C++, Go, Java, Python, Ruby, and C#.

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gRPC is a high performance, open-source remote procedure call (RPC) framework that can run anywhere. It enables client and server applications to communicate transparently, and makes it easier to build connected systems. The gRPC framework is developed and open-sourced by Google. Google has been using a lot of the underlying technologies and concepts in gRPC for a long time for their many products including several of Google’s cloud products.

gRPC follows HTTP semantics over HTTP/2. It allows you to build services with both synchronous and asynchronous communication model. It supports traditional Request/Response model and bidirectional streams. Its capability for building full-duplex streaming lets you use it for advanced scenarios where both client and server applications can send stream of data asynchronously.

By default, gRPC uses Protocol Buffers as the Interface Definition Language (IDL) and as its underlying message interchange format"
grpc / grpc.io

grpc / gRPC Motivation and Design Principles.