The History and Design Decisions Behind Protocol Buffers
Last updated
Last updated
Understanding the motivations behind ' creation and the key decisions that shaped its development can help you leverage its features more effectively. This article delves deeper into the origins, design choices, and considerations behind this popular data serialization format.
The story of Protocol Buffers starts within Google itself. Several internal projects relied heavily on this efficient data format. However, Google also harbored ambitions to open-source some of these projects. To achieve this goal, they needed to make Protocol Buffers, the underlying foundation, publicly available first.
Beyond facilitating open-source efforts, Google recognized the advantages of Protocol Buffers for public APIs. While they offered APIs accepting both and Protocol Buffers, they favored the latter due to its efficiency. Serialization and deserialization are significantly faster with Protocol Buffers, leading to improved performance for API interactions.
But the decision to release Protocol Buffers wasn't purely strategic. Google genuinely believed that developers outside the company could benefit from this efficient and well-designed format. Additionally, releasing Protocol Buffers as open-source was seen as a valuable side project, fostering a collaborative development environment and broader adoption within the developer community.
The first iteration of Protocol Buffers, known as Proto1, began development in early 2001. Initially, features were added in an ad-hoc manner to meet specific needs as they arose. This organic growth resulted in a format that, while functional, lacked a well-defined structure, making it challenging to maintain and potentially error-prone.
Recognizing these limitations, Google made the critical decision to forgo releasing Proto1 as it was. Instead, they embarked on a complete overhaul, resulting in Proto2, the first publicly available version.
Proto2 retained the core design principles and valuable implementation ideas from Proto1. However, it also introduced new features like extensions and improved language support. Additionally, some less-used features from Proto1 were removed to streamline the format. Most importantly, Proto2 underwent a rigorous cleanup process. It was decoupled from non-public Google libraries, ensuring wider compatibility and easier adoption by external developers.
The name "Protocol Buffers" has its roots in the format's early days, predating the introduction of the protocol buffer compiler that generates classes for various programming languages. Back then, a class named "ProtocolBuffer" acted as a buffer for data associated with individual methods. Users would add data to this buffer using methods like "AddValue(tag, value)." The raw bytes were stored and written out upon message completion.
While the "buffer" aspect of the name is no longer entirely relevant with the introduction of the compiler, it has remained a part of the format's identity. Today, different terms are used to distinguish various aspects of Protocol Buffers:
Protocol message: Refers to the message in an abstract sense, representing the data structure.
Protocol buffer: Refers to the serialized message copy, typically in a compact binary format.
Protocol message object: Refers to the in-memory object representing the parsed message after deserialization.
When adopting a new technology, concerns about potential patent issues can arise. Google addresses this proactively by explicitly stating that they currently hold no patents on Protocol Buffers. They are also committed to transparency and open to addressing any patent-related concerns users might have. This commitment fosters trust and encourages wider adoption of Protocol Buffers within the developer community.
Ideal Use Cases for Protobuf
Protobuf excels in scenarios where performance and data integrity are paramount:
Protocol Buffers are often compared to other data serialization formats like ASN.1, COM, CORBA, and Thrift. While Google acknowledges the strengths and weaknesses of each system, they emphasize the importance of evaluating each option based on project-specific needs.
In conclusion, understanding the history and design decisions behind Protocol Buffers provides valuable insights into its functionality and philosophy. From its internal roots at Google to its open-source embrace, Protocol Buffers has evolved into a powerful and efficient data serialization format. By delving deeper into its background, developers can make informed decisions about when and how to leverage Protocol Buffers to create efficient and scalable applications.
: Efficient data exchange is crucial in microservices communication. Protobuf is a perfect fit for this purpose.
Integration: Protobuf forms the foundation of gRPC, a high-performance framework for distributed systems communication.
A key distinction is that some of these technologies, like CORBA, define both an interchange format and an protocol. Protocol Buffers, on the other hand, solely focus on the interchange format. While limited RPC service definition support exists within Protocol Buffers, it is not tied to a specific RPC implementation or protocol. This flexibility allows developers to choose the RPC framework that best suits their application's requirements.