Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) applied to EDI pipelines
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Google binary serialisation — faster than Avro, but stricter.
Definition
Protobuf v3: .proto schemas compiled into code (Java, Go, Python, JS, C++), varint binary encoding (very compact), strict schema evolution (immutable tag numbers). 5-10x faster performance than JSON. Extensively used in gRPC, Apache Beam, Google Cloud Pub/Sub.
Origin
Initially developed at Google from 2001, open-sourced in 2008.
Example in context
A Go service serialising an Order to binary Protobuf for publishing to Pub/Sub.