Exposing protocol-buffers interfaces

Question

I am building a distributed system which consist of modules/application with interfaces defined by protobuf messages.

Is it a good idea to expose those protobuf messages to a client directly? ... or maybe it's better to prepare a shared library which will be responsible for translation of (let's assume) method based interface to a protobuf based for each module and clients won't be aware about protobuf at all?

Answer 1

It's neither a "good idea" nor a bad one. It depends on whether or not you want to impose protocol buffers onto your consumers. A large part of that decision is, then:

• Who are your consumers? Do you mind exposing the protobuf specifics to them?
• Will the clients be written in languages which have protobuf support?

My $0.02 is that this is a perfect use case for Protocol Buffers, since they were specifically designed with cross-system, cross-language interchange in mind. The .proto file makes for a concise, language-independent, thorough description of the data format. Of course, there are other similar/competing formats & libraries out there to consider (see: Thrift, Cap'n Proto, etc.) if you decide to head down this path.