Java Pub House 93. Not your Grandpa's Serialization Part DEUX!

We're back! and now we move to the new-fangled serialization and deserialization frameworks, starting with Protobufs! Google's contribution to the serialization space, Protobuf V3 makes it easy to create a very efficient on-the-wire serialized representation of objects, and then some. With the ability to have both backwards and forward compatible changes, protobufs is a great choice for transmitting information across services.

But not to be outdone, @BobPaulin goes in and covers Thrift, which goes a step beyond than just serializing messages, but also takes care of the "Transport layer", adding the ability of doing Remote-procedure-calls! Imagine if instead of saying "I need to send a message to that service, and then the service can process it and send info back", you just said. "I want to call a method on that service with this parameters and get the results". Thrift exposes that functionality by letting you have an interface that you can just call in your client service, and it "magically" coordinates all the gnarly stuff to encode, transmit, execute, decode, and present your call. You don't even have to think (too deeply) about how it all happens. As long as you define your thrift objects, thrift methods, and Thrift transport, the framework will let you just think of methods to call! that's it!

So in all, a very fun episode where we discover what the new types of serialization frameworks are up to. If you ever had to create a message, or ever had to annotate an object as Serializable, then do take a listen to this episode!

Google Protobuf

Apache Thrift

Protobuf Java Example

Thrift Example

JVM Serializers performance

[rentedunicorn]

Great stuff! Thanks for sharing. One feedback - IntelliJ's font size was very small and difficult to read but Eclipse's was fine. So in future could you increase IntelliJ font when screen sharing?