Protobuf

• A common way of declaring a function which is gonna be part of a service + what it expects from the caller to pass to it.
  • Common as in platform agnostic and programming language agnostic.
• Human-readable.
• Think of it this way:
  • We’ll have some interfaces which needs to be implemented (in other words it’s our Interface Definition Language (IDL)).
  • Encode and decode data in order to be sent over the wire.
• Then we have a generator. E.g. ts-proto
• An ordinary text file with a .proto extension.

[!NOTE]

We can use something like JSON as our data exchange format, but .proto files have several advantages which make them a better candidate for the job.

How It Works

1. Define the structure for the data you wanna serialize in a proto file.

   message Person {
     int32 id = 1;
     string name = 2;
     bool is_active = 3;
   }
   

   message: a small logical record of information containing a series of name-value pairs called fields

2. Use protoc to generate data access classes in your preferred language from your .proto definition.

   [!TIP]

   Though they are supporting JS, but if you need TS interfaces, etc you need to turn to some other libraries such as ts-proto.

   ts-protoc --ts_proto_out=./output -I=./protos ./protoc/*.proto --ts_proto_opt=addGrpcMetadata=true --ts_proto_opt=addNestjsRestParameter=true --ts_proto_opt=nestJs=true --ts_proto_opt=exportCommonSymbols=false
   

   Learn more here.