Beginning Bazel: Building and Testing for Java, Go, and More

© P.J. McNerney 2020

P. McNerneyBeginning Bazelhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5194-2_6

6. Protocol Buffers and Bazel

P. J. McNerney¹ 

(1)

Blackhawk, CO, USA

 

In the last chapter, you created a simple echo server and client, demonstrating some of the power of Bazel to navigate and manage multiple languages with minimal setup. A noted shortcoming from that example stems from the definition of the transmitted object: both languages required independent definitions of the object. Over time, this easily can cause a literal breakdown in communication as two (or more) definitions of the transmitted object drift out of sync.

In this chapter, we are going to introduce a construct to handle this very problem, the Protocol Buffer (often referred to as protobuf ...