Hey folks. Anyone with experience in proto buffers...

# announcements

[Holger Steinhauer [Mod]]

Hey folks. Anyone with experience in proto buffers here?

[nfrankel]

i’ve used it once
for a recruiting agency, that qualifies
and for you? 😅

[Jan Steinke]

do you have a specific question?

[Holger Steinhauer [Mod]]

Well, not a concrete one.
A potential customer has $something implemented in Go. They seem to have used Protobuffers. I am not sure yet, for what kind of communication they use it (it is a mobile-first SaaS thingy with an “interestingly designed” micro(?-)service backend).

They asked me what it would take to migrate to Kotlin. And this is why I asked that vague question here. I remember that we spoke a bit about protobuff on one of the VKUG sessions, but I was wondering if we have some peopz here with production experience.
How easy is it, to adapt protobuf with KTor? What were challenges you face in production when using protobuf?
These are just a few questions that come up in my mind, but there is no concrete question I need a specific technical answer to. If this makes sense 🙈

[jush]

maybe ask in #C7A1U5PTM Kotlin Serialization supports protobufs

[Jan Steinke]

We use it in production with http4k and it’s no problem, I can’t speak for KTor

[sashjakk]

https://github.com/square/wire

[sashjakk]

Envoy proxy provides automagical wiring between grpc methods and produces rest api. Pretty nice for debugging 😊

[Holger Steinhauer [Mod]]

Interesting. So there seems to be usable support for it. Now it is about where they really use it and if they really need it 😛

[Holger Steinhauer [Mod]]

Thanks for your help folks! I might come back and ask actual questions 😄

[Rob Elliot]

Google’s JVM protobuf generation libraries work just fine from Kotlin just as they do from Java - though the classes they generate are hideous. Still, it’s what the last two projects I’ve worked on have used successfully.

[Jan Steinke]

We used the streem/pbandk artefacts before, and are in the process to replace them with the square/wire artefacts for better support. If you are using gRPC then the official bindings are quite nice!

[Holger Steinhauer [Mod]]

Do you have some recommendations on good introduction material? gRPC for dummies in 10 minutes or so?

[Jan Steinke]

The documentation is actually the best resource, IMHO. I haven’t found good videos or high quality blog posts yet.

https://grpc.io/docs/languages/kotlin/quickstart/

[Jan Steinke]

There is also #CRMJV6Y4B where you can ask directly

[Holger Steinhauer [Mod]]

Awesome. Will check this out and just joined the channel