Mastering Go - Second Edition

Defining the interface definition file

As you learned in the previous section, before we begin developing the gRPC client and server for our service, we need to define some data structures and protocols that will be used by them.

Protocol Buffers (protobuf) is a method for serializing structured data. As protobuf uses the binary format, it takes up less space than plain text serialization formats such as JSON and XML. However, it needs to be encoded and decoded in order to be machine-usable and human-readable, respectively.

As a result, in order to be able to use protobuf in your applications, you will need to download the necessary tools that allow you to work with it – the funny thing is that most protobuf tools are written in Go because ...