Distributed Services with Go

Chapter 2Structure Data with Protocol Buffers

When building distributed services, you’re communicating between the services over a network. To send data (such as your structs) over a network, you need to encode the data in a format to transmit, and lots of programmers choose JSON. When you’re building public APIs or you’re creating a project where you don’t control the clients, JSON makes sense because it’s accessible—both for humans to read and computers to parse. But when you’re building private APIs or building projects where you do control the clients, you can make use of a mechanism for structuring and transmitting data that—compared to JSON—makes you more productive and helps you create services that are faster, have more features, and ...