Building RESTful Web services with Go

Protocol buffer language

A protocol buffer is a file with a minimalistic language syntax. We compile a protocol buffer and the target file is generated for a programming language. For example, in Go, the compiled file will be a .go file with structs mapping the protobuf file. In Java, a class file will be created. Think protocol buffer as the skeleton for data with a particular order. We need to know the types before jumping into the actual code. In order to make things easier, I am going to first show JSON and its equivalent in protocol buffers. Then, we will implement a solid example.

Here, we are going to use proto3 as our protocol buffer version. There are slight variations in versions, but the latest one was released with improvements. ...