Data Serialization in Distributed Systems: A Deep Dive into Protobuf and TypeScript
When it comes to designing a distributed system’s architecture, one crucial aspect is how data is transmitted between its various components. This data transmission can be achieved through various methods, including HTTP requests, WebSockets, event emitters, and other protocols. In this article, we’ll explore a vital aspect of data transfer within distributed systems – data serialization – with a focus on a specific protocol called Protobuf and its application in serializing TypeScript objects.
What is Data Serialization?
Data serialization is the process of transforming a data object into a stream of bytes, making it easier to store and transmit. The reverse operation, deserialization, involves reconstructing the data object from the stream of bytes into a native structure, allowing the receiving application to understand and manipulate the data.
Common Use Cases of Data Serialization
Data serialization plays a vital role in storing and transferring data within distributed systems. Some common use cases include:
- Making requests to and receiving responses from REST APIs
- Storing in-memory data on disks or in databases
- Transporting data through messaging protocols like AMQP
- Putting items in a queue
- Sending event messages to a topic in a system like Kafka
Introducing Protobuf
Protobuf, short for Protocol Buffers, is a language- and platform-neutral mechanism developed by Google for serializing structured data. It allows for a structured way to define data schemas, making it easy to build and update serialized data. Unlike JSON and XML, Protobufs are not intended to be easily read by humans, as they use a binary format for data serialization.
Pros and Cons of Protobufs
Some benefits of using Protobufs include:
- Faster and smaller than most serialization encodings, like JSON or XML
- Handle breaking changes better than any other serialization mechanism by enforcing deprecation rather than completely removing a field
- Language- and platform-neutral, making them a good mechanism for transferring data between systems with different language implementations
- Support a wider range of data types than JSON, such as enums
However, some drawbacks of using Protobufs include:
- Lack of human readability
- Limited support for complex data types, such as maps and nested objects
- Place restrictions on changing structured data, making collaboration between multiple authors or teams somewhat challenging
Serializing Data using Protobuf and TypeScript
TypeScript is a great option for Protobuf serialization because it’s strongly typed. This strict typing is a good match for Protobuf’s message structures and allows us to work with clearly defined data models and easier-to-maintain code that is less prone to runtime errors.
To get started, we’ll create a TypeScript project and model the data for serialization based on a phone book with contacts. We’ll define our data structure using a.proto file, which will guide what attributes and possible values we would like to support in our Protobuf messages.
Defining Protobuf Messages for Our Data
We’ll create a directory to contain our Protobuf messages and define our message structures using the.proto file. Our Protobuf message definition will represent the phone book data we want to handle, including optional and repeated attributes.
Compiling the TypeScript Objects from Our Protobuf Definitions
We’ll use the protoc compiler to turn our Protobuf messages into TypeScript interfaces we can use in our code. We’ll also need to install a plugin, ts-protoc-gen, to generate TypeScript declaration files to provide typings for the corresponding JavaScript objects.
Improving the TypeScript Object Structure in Our Protobuf Messages
We can improve our Protobuf messages by building the messages into separate files, generating classes in individual files that can be referenced by import. We’ll also create a Bash script to simplify running the protoc command with the needed arguments and cleanup tasks.
Building and Serializing a Protobuf Message from TypeScript Objects
Using our generated TypeScript Message classes and their setter methods, we can create and set our Phonebook message, serialize it into bytes, and deserialize it back into an object that we then log.
With this implementation, we can now serialize and deserialize data with Protobuf and TypeScript, leveraging the power of Protobuf’s language-independent data serialization protocol.