Advantages of Using Protocol Buffer

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.

	XML	JSON	protobuf
Readability	Normal	High	Low
Strictness	Low	Normal	High
Size Efficiency	Low	Normal	High

JSON is good to be debug and read by humans. If our object is mainly intended to be processed by machines, readability is not the focus.

JSON only support three basic types which are boolean, number, and string. Meanwhile, protobuf defines more data types so that any platforms or programming languages can decode the object into the desired type automatically. Besides, the strictness of the data type can be maintained among machines because protobuf requires all machines or applications to maintain the data or message schema with a set of rules and options.

Unlike XML or JSON which maintain the object schema in the payload explicitly and deliver the object as plain text, protobuf encodes the object into optimized binary with certain tags to describe the object structure. While the complete object schema is maintained in every machine. This leads to the payload size reduction.

There is also a CLI tool called protoc that can help us perform the encoding and decoding of data. Besides, this tool can also generate the class to instantiate the object defined in the protobuf schema for various programming languages.

Another benefit of protobuf, it standardises a mechanism so that it can handle both backward and forward compatibility. Backward compatibility means that a machine can still process the object delivered by another machine with an earlier version. Forward compatibility means it can handle the object delivered by a machine with a later version. This can be achieved inheritely by the concept of default value and reserved field embedded in protobuf.

As a reminder, protobuf doesn't handle the communication process. This is handled by another framework like gRPC. However, protobuf can define a service block in the schema to describe how a service will receive the request message and send the response message.

Comments

Rangkaian Sensor Infrared dengan Photo Dioda

Keunggulan photodioda dibandingkan LDR adalah photodioda lebih tidak rentan terhadap noise karena hanya menerima sinar infrared, sedangkan LDR menerima seluruh cahaya yang ada termasuk infrared. Rangkaian yang akan kita gunakan adalah seperti gambar di bawah ini. Pada saat intensitas Infrared yang diterima Photodiode besar maka tahanan Photodiode menjadi kecil, sedangkan jika intensitas Infrared yang diterima Photodiode kecil maka tahanan yang dimiliki photodiode besar. Jika tahanan photodiode kecil maka tegangan V- akan kecil . Misal tahanan photodiode mengecil menjadi 10kOhm. Maka dengan teorema pembagi tegangan: V- = Rrx/(Rrx + R2) x Vcc V- = 10 / (10+10) x Vcc V- = (1/2) x 5 Volt V- = 2.5 Volt Sedangkan jika tahanan photodiode besar maka tegangan V- akan besar (mendekati nilai Vcc). Misal tahanan photodiode menjadi 150kOhm. Maka dengan teorema pembagi tegangan: V- = Rrx/(Rrx + R2) x Vcc V- = 150 / (1...

Configuring Swap Memory on Ubuntu Using Ansible

If we maintain a Linux machine with a low memory capacity while we are required to run an application with high memory consumption, enabling swap memory is an option. Ansible can be utilized as a helper tool to automate the creation of swap memory. A swap file can be allocated in the available storage of the machine. The swap file then can be assigned as a swap memory. Firstly, we should prepare the inventory file. The following snippet is an example, you must provide your own configuration. [server] 192.168.1.2 [server:vars] ansible_user=root ansible_ssh_private_key_file=~/.ssh/id_rsa Secondly, we need to prepare the task file that contains not only the tasks but also some variables and connection information. For instance, we set /swapfile as the name of our swap file. We also set the swap memory size to 2GB and the swappiness level to 60. - hosts: server become: true vars: swap_vars: size: 2G swappiness: 60 For simplicity, we only check the...

API Gateway Using KrakenD

The increasing demands of users for high-quality web services create the need to integrate various technologies into our application. This will cause the code base to grow larger, making maintenance more difficult over time. A microservices approach offers a solution, where the application is built by combining multiple smaller services, each with a distinct function. For example, one service handles authentication, another manages business functions, another maintains file uploads, and so on. These services communicate and integrate through a common channel. On the client side, users don't need to understand how the application is built or how it functions internally. They simply send a request to a single endpoint, and processes like authentication, caching, or database querying happen seamlessly. This is where an API gateway is effective. It handles user requests and directs them to the appropriate handler. There are several tools available for building an API gateway, su...

Deploying a Web Server on UpCloud using Terraform Modules

In my earlier post , I shared an example of deploying UpCloud infrastructure using Terraform from scratch. In this post, I want to share how to deploy the infrastructure using available Terraform modules to speed up the set-up process, especially for common use cases like preparing a web server. For instance, our need is to deploy a website with some conditions as follows. The website can be accessed through HTTPS. If the request is HTTP, it will be redirected to HTTPS. There are 2 domains, web1.yourdomain.com and web2.yourdomain.com . But, users should be redirected to "web2" if they are visiting "web1". There are 4 main modules that we need to set up the environment. Private network. It allows the load balancer to connect with the server and pass the traffic. Server. It is used to host the website. Load balancer. It includes backend and frontend configuration. Dynamic certificate. It is requ...

Installing VSCode Server Manually on Ubuntu

I've ever gotten stuck on updating the VSCode server on my remote server because of an unstable connection between my remote server and visualstudio.com that host the updated server source codes. The download and update process failed over and over so I couldn't remotely access my remote files through VSCode. The solution is by downloading the server source codes through a host with a stable connection which in my case I downloaded from a cloud VPS server. Then I transfer the downloaded source codes as a compressed file to my remote server through SCP. Once the file had been on my remote sever, I extracted them and align the configuration. The more detailed steps are as follows. First, we should get the commit ID of our current VSCode application by clicking on the About option on the Help menu. The commit ID is a hexadecimal number like 92da9481c0904c6adfe372c12da3b7748d74bdcb . Then we can download the compressed server source codes as a single file from the host. ...

Deliver SaaS According Twelve-Factor App

If you haven't heard of the twelve-factor app , it gives us a recommendation or a methodology for developing SaaS or web apps structured into twelve items. The recommendation has some connections with microservice architecture and cloud-native environments which become more popular today. We can learn the details on its website . In this post, we will do a quick review of the twelve points. One Codebase Multiple Deployment We should maintain only one codebase for our application even though the application may be deployed into multiple environments like development, staging, and production. Having multiple codebases will lead to any kinds of complicated issues. Explicitly State Dependencies All the dependencies for running our application should be stated in the project itself. Many programming languages have a kind of file that maintains a list of the dependencies like package.json in Node.js. We should also be aware of the dependencies related to the pla...

LUKI NOTES

Search This Blog