JSON transfer vs Binary transfer

Question

When it comes to computer/network all data are transferred as 0s and 1s. If so I don't understand what makes difference binary protocol than text protocol. I do understand when it comes image other transfer can happen on binary protocol as those bytes are not human readable. But during REST web service call binary transfer faster than JSON as we are transferring text only. Please refer if there is any link to understand in depth. Thanks!

Answer 1

You can find a great and extensive explanation of the advantages of binary protocols over text protocols (such as REST or XML) in the ProtoBuf documentation (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/overview) and the explanation of it's binary format (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/encoding).

At the risk of over simplifying, binary formats allow for a concise description of the data by sacrificing human readability. By "concise" I mean orders of magnitude smaller.

This is possible because TCP and UDP don't care about the payload. The payload is only important to the application, so therefore the app can define a specific purpose format to describe the data. Thus a single byte in the payload can have 256 interpretable meanings if you define it that way.

General purpose, human readable formats like REST and XML need to be interpreted by general purpose parsers. So their formatting adds bytes to differentiate between data elements, value labels, and general human readability. These extra bytes will be extensive and can easily exceed the size of the data itself.

In many cases the human readability is a preferable sacrifice, such as in simple client/server apps. But for high performance, massively scaled infrastructures (such as Google's search index) the overhead becomes a huge penalty to performance and a binary format is necessary.