Protobuf

To encode communication between services, we use protobuf messages. Virtually any programming language can compile its structs or objects to protobuf bytes which allows for fast serialization and deserialization.

Intuition: think of protobuf messages as JSON messages: an intermediary format that can be understood by many programming languages, but then much faster and not human-readable

Definitions

Unlike the JSON format, protobuf messages need to be defined beforehand. From these definitions we can generate serialization and deserialization code for many languages. For the ASE framework, we have defined our messages in the rovercom library. These messages are transpiled to commonly used languages already and can be used to communicate between services. The rovercom messages are bundled as part of a roverlib so there is no need to compile or include them manually, yet you can find usage and installation information here.

Definitions​

Definitions