Summary
In this chapter, we covered the basics of serialization and illustrated how our data structures can be encoded using various serialization protocols, including XML, JSON, and Protocol Buffers. You learned about the differences between the most popular serialization protocols and their main advantages and disadvantages.
We also covered the basics of the Protocol Buffers serialization format and showed how to define custom data structures in its schema definition language. We used some example code to illustrate how to generate the schema files for the Go language. Finally, we compared the performance of XML, JSON, and Protocol Buffers formats, and discussed some common data serialization best practices.
In the next chapter, we are going to demonstrate how to use Protocol Buffers-based serialization for communication between services.
