Beyond JSON: Improving inter-app communication
summary
Concrete comparisons and a working rollout decide this one: benchmarks show binary Protocol Buffers serialize much smaller on the wire though Ruby encode/decode is slower, Go is fast; a homegrown framed TCP protocol called tcpc carries protos with a one‑word header and a client‑side load balancer; HTTP/2 plus gRPC is presented as the alternative; the stack has run in production for almost two years sending hundreds of millions of messages and the custom approach actually works.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (14)
- 0:00Introduction
- 2:17Why inter-app comms matters
- 3:43Protocols and formats
- 5:30From punch cards to JSON
- 9:30JSON’s bag of glass problem
- 11:38Introducing Protocol Buffers
- 14:29How Protocol Buffers work
- 17:25Backwards compatibility
- 19:29Benchmarking formats
- 23:29Designing TCPC
- 26:44Learning from papers
- 28:50gRPC and future
- 30:18Steal ideas
- 30:41Q&A
