artwork VS Protobuf.NET

They developed a solution, and open sourced it as GraphQL.

I'm using the Official GraphQL, HowToGraphQL and several other websites to curate my own notes on GraphQL.

Your cloud architecture, system design and project leadership skills should be more important than language specifics when interviewing. That being said, I recommend learning about Node.js internals (e.g. the event loop); ES6+ language improvements; and some trending tools and libraries like TypeScript, Docker, Serverless Framework and GraphQL. Know enough about Express and serverless functions justify using one over the other when designing a system.

API stands for Application Programming Interface. APIs define how two pieces of software can connect and talk to each other. If your application were a big company, your API's job would be to keep in touch with external parties (customers or company partners, for example). Most APIs are organized around some standard, like REST or GraphQL, so that everybody knows how to use them.

GraphQL is developed by Facebook initially for their mobile app and has been adopted widely across web apps.

Last week, I built a microservice: a resource for a section of the landing page of the platform, which renders from a database loaded with data. In technical terms, I built and consumed an API. I used Dynamo DB (a database provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS))) to store my data, creating a table with desired fields for me to use in populating my table. GraphQL was used as playground for me to query and mutate my database. i.e. a way of creating, reading, updating and deleting information from the database, a process technically known as CRUD.

GraphQL, if you are not familiar, is a way of having APIs which are query-able similar to SQL for a database.

GraphQL.org

More than that, it's a good idea for storing non-sensitive data across the application. It might be a Redux or GraphQL state or some global app-wide variables. On the other hand, you shouldn’t use that for storing tokens and secrets, as the storage is not encrypted in any way.

AWS AppSync is a fully managed GraphQL API which is a serverless offering by AWS.

This article requires that reader is familar with core concept of Akka.NET serialization (see https://getakka.net/articles/serialization/serialization.html) and ProtoBuf-Net library (see https://github.com/protobuf-net/protobuf-net).

The model used, a simple invoice which uses protobuf-net 1 NuGet package to store information in a binary file.

Not sure if it works with gRPC but I really like how Protobuf.NET uses attributes like other serializers instead of needing to write a .proto and generate (not-very-C#-friendly) classes from it. Well, until you need to interop with other languages.

I mentioned JSON, but there are many formats that are much more efficient. I can mention FlatBuffers, MessagePack and ProtoBuf. These are the ones I've used myself, and personally I'm most comfortable with MessagePack and ProtoBuf. I don't think the performance would be an issue if you had to choose between these three, it's mostly the API that is different.

The closest way would be using Grpc.Web + Protobuf.net. The overall experience is pretty close to WCF server + Client where you share a common interface and let the client and server just call through those.

Grpc Web with Blazor WASM is a really pleasant experience so far imo for my personal projects at home. You have strongly typed models and methods and you have choice on sharing the contract between client and server if you're using code first instead of proto IDL files (e.g. protobuf-net).

It's pretty straight-forward to follow the protobuf-net docs to serialize the report, but we should really GZIP the stream for sending to reduce bandwidth consumption and improve performance:

There are a number of Protobuf implementations for .NET Core, but I like protobuf-net as it's a nice, clean, Apache 2.0 Licensed implementation. It is also supported by protogen, a great online generator that will output protobuf-net classes ready for use (for its CSharp profile). If you open the latest schema from the link here, you can simply paste into the generator. NOTE: At the time of writing, [(js_preEncoded)=true] isn't supported by the generator, and can be removed from the proto schema.

> Protobuf-java is a little heavy [...] Just depending on the library adds 1.6MB and nearly 700 classes before you even generate your own message classes.

By comparison, protobuf-net [1] is about 260KB and 68 classes. Python's [2] is a 1MB package download (with source).

Why's the Java one so big?

[1] https://github.com/protobuf-net/protobuf-net

[2] https://pypi.org/project/protobuf