artwork VS Protobuf

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.

It's because they changed the versioning format: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/releases?page=5

But I suppose old version still receive bugfixes.

For at least 4 years protobuf has had decent support for self-describing messages (very similar to avro) as well as reflection

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

Xgooglers trying to make do on the cheap will just create a Union of all their messages and include the message def in a self-describing message pattern. Super-sensitive network I/O can elide the message def (empty buffer) and any for RecordIO clone well file compression takes care of the definition.

Definitely useful to be able to dig out old defs but protobuf maintainers have surprisingly added useful features so you don’t have to.

Bonus points tho for extracting the protobuf defs that e.g. Apple bakes into their binaries.

gRPC Gateway is a protoc plugin that reads gRPC service definitions and generates a reverse proxy server that translates a RESTful JSON API into gRPC.

To use more recent versions of protoc in future applications, you can download them from the Protobuf repository.

Use the Protobuf CLI protoc and the plugin protoc-gen-tonic.

> didn’t find any standard for separating protobuf messages

The fact that protobufs are not self-delimiting is an endless source of frustration, but I know of 2 standards:

- SerializeDelimited* is part of the protobuf library: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

- Riegeli is "a file format for storing a sequence of string records, typically serialized protocol buffers. It supports dense compression, fast decoding, seeking, detection and optional skipping of data corruption, filtering of proto message fields for even faster decoding, and parallel encoding": https://github.com/google/riegeli

It looks like it is in fact universal. Just glancing at the code here, it looks like the tool searches any arbitrary file for bytes that look like encoded protobuf descriptors, specifically looking for bytes that are plausibly the beginning of a FileDescriptorProto message defined here:

https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/src/go...

This takes advantage of the fact that such descriptors are commonly compiled into programs that use protobuf. The descriptors are usually embedded as constant byte arrays. That said, not all protobuf implementations embed the descriptors and those that do often have an option to inhibit such embedding (at the expense of losing some dynamic introspection features).

Not much. You can check the source code in https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf. For example, for serializing a boolean in C#: https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/blob/main/csharp/src/Google.Protobuf/WritingPrimitives.cs#L165. Strings and objects are a bit more complicated, but it is all about turning the data into its byte representation.