Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) are a key component of gRPC, serving as the interface definition language. They define the structure for data that will be serialized and deserialized by gRPC. Protobufs provide language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. This allows developers to write data structures once and use them across multiple languages.
In gRPC, Protobuf is used to define both the service interface and the structure of payload messages. It enables the automatic generation of client and server code. The generated code includes methods for packing/unpacking messages and sending/receiving them over the network.
Moreover, Protobuf offers advantages such as smaller payloads and faster serialization/deserialization compared to JSON or XML. Its binary format leads to efficient encoding of data. However, it’s not human-readable which can be a disadvantage in debugging scenarios.
